The patron saint of extras is Kevin Costner. You know the story. How in 1983 the budding young actor was tapped to play Alex in The Big Chill, the character whose untimely demise provides the occasion for Jeff Goldblum and the rest of the cast to drive around soulfully in their BMWs
Continue reading… "Grace"The names are gone. The Young One, who used to pound on the piano with such fervor, has grown up. Fervor. Now there’s a word. Why does fervor remain when he has lost so many names? All the important ones. Gone. Gone with one stroke. Stroke. That’s the word he’d wanted at the pharmacy. Not a strike like in baseball, but a
Continue reading… "Piano Forte"It was one of those steamy July days in Minnesota when hair expands to twice its normal size and clothes get damp and sticky right after you put them on. My dad’s stomach cancer surgery had been two months earlier. Now I was driving my folks to see the oncologist in Dad’s prized red Ford pick-up. During the eight short blocks to the clinic, he sat as unmoving as a stone. But his pain
Continue reading… "Everything You Wanted to Know"It was the embrace of two women who understood. Maizie had spread the quilt across her bed and called her daughter to join her. She had been working on this quilt for almost twenty-five years but hadn’t shown it to Sunny until today.
Continue reading… "Maizie’s Hope"“What’s wrong with you, Talley? You’re dead out there. On the floor? You know that? Dead.”
Talley knew. He knew it deeply, in the aching calcification of his bones and the sludge that had settled sedimentarily in his brain.
A never-ending skirmish was our version of a feuding David and Goliath, right-vs.-might, old-timer versus newcomer, downscale versus upscale conflict, guaranteed to make Dollar Island’s Gossip Hall of Fame.
Continue reading… "The Great Chicken Stand-off"Keith broke the water gasping, exhilarated. ‘A ten!’ he thought and swam toward the pool’s edge. He watched another diver enter. An eight. For a moment he bobbed at the edge.
Continue reading… "Floating"I woke up on the “day of concern” at 6:03 a.m., as I have done since I was seven years old. I sat on the edge of my bed and counted my teeth with my tongue. I have a total of thirty teeth. When I was eight, I had thirty-two, at that time I read an article that said when aliens take humans for testing they will often remove a tooth or two. Since then every morning I count my teeth to make sure I have all thirty-two of them.
Continue reading… "The Day of Concern"Mila said she never trusted the clouds out in that country. In the summer they looked harmless enough, soft pillows or feathery streaks, but it was their way of moving she distrusted, with no set path and no mountains to guide their course. Even after living there all her adult life, she said, she still felt a little nausea, like motion sickness, just thinking about it.
Continue reading… "Aunt Mila"The old bench is abandoned now, its rotting wood gives no indication of the child that once played upon it or the tears that once ran down it to the earth. The rusty metal flakes off at the touch. Yet it is to this bench that I always return, and even though each year I pull farther away from my childhood, I hold desperately onto the bench and all that it entails
Continue reading… "Last Look"