The Essentials of Acceleration

I’m a good driver, and by this I don’t just mean safe. Like a good runner who doesn’t waste motion in her stride, I maneuver my car with dexterity and precision. I merge smoothly and without braking. In three moves, I can parallel park on both sides of the street. One of my friends is the mechanic at the corner garage. He respects my studious approach to the art of driving, and I admire his work. He’s honest and his hours are reliable, unlike the dry cleaner up the street who repeatedly closes at ten to seven and will not open the door even if you point out the time. Leo, the mechanic, is Mexican. His family also owns Guadalajara, across the street, where I occasionally have a burrito.

Grasshopper Kings

His son flings the stick behind the hedges when he spots the car approaching. Flynn is home late again. The boy is on the front lawn in a shirt with the sleeves cut off, his wiry arms behind his back now. Even from a distance, Flynn saw the flames eating the end of the stick. The smoke hovers around his son’s head like an apparition as Flynn steps toward him. Ryan, my sweet boy, he says, I thought we’d put this fire business behind us.

Unintended

Shinji arrived at his cousin’s house early Monday afternoon after a four-hour train ride from Tokyo. His cousin’s wife, Yumi, was the only one home. Despite short notice, she immediately made Shiji feel welcome. Over some tea and homemade apple cake—she said she taught cooking classes at a local cultural center—they had their semi-introductory conversation. They had never had a chance to sit down and talk one-on-one before. And in the course of this initial chat, she told him about an incident involving her son Kazuo.

Wildflowers of the Western Chaparral

Mr. Lohnert acts as though he doesn’t notice that home or its occupants whenever he passes by now, as though there is nothing there but a giant hole at the end of a short driveway to nowhere, even though they’ve been neighbors nearly forever. If any of them is outside their old moss-sided white double-wide, especially her, he will cross the terracotta-colored road and then the ditch, walking right through if the water is running high, getting wet to his knees. Sometimes when he’s crossing, he feels the way an escaped prisoner from years ago must have, sensing the bloodhounds close behind, knowing he is barely a creek and a hillside scramble away from being apprehended.

The Caretaker

They were dogging bear again. It was the fourth night that autumn he’d been woken by the bawling hounds. The din they made put them someplace on the two-track, not far above the breaks that marked the western edge of Hannah Tucker’s property. A halfhearted drizzle plunked along the Airstream. Hoping against hope that the poachers, plotts and blueticks would turn away from Hannah’s, Tom Phillip climbed from bed and staggered the three short steps past his toilet, couch and kitchen. It was cold inside the trailer. As Tom knelt to light the stove, there came the unmistakeable clamor of the pack lining out on a scent, baying their quarry down the saddle from the upland.

Race

Hakim woke early the morning of the half-marathon—six A.M.—the last Saturday in August, though the race didn’t start until seven-thirty. Sarah, his renter, had to be at the Yeast-I-Can-Do at five, so she made coffee before she left, though never strong enough, and he added a spoonful of instant to the carafe. Sarah had an upstairs room—renting, for Hakim was an experiment whose verdict was still out. The house was too big for one person, and Hakim liked having the extra money for utilities, which in a small town were expensive. He didn’t mind Sarah’s peculiarities. She kept an odd schedule, sometimes in bed at seven, sometimes going out with friends and staying out all night. She was tall and had wild red hair and had come from Vermont to ice climb, though it was summer when people got work and fall when rooms and apartments opened up. She had broken up with her boyfriend, with whom she’d been camping, and maybe because she was twenty-six, half as old as he was, he found himself focusing on her comings and goings more than he wished to.

The Miracle Worker

When Mrs. Mansour first came to the house, I thought she was alone. Naturally I could see only her face; the rest of her had been draped in the traditional black. But there was something modern about her right away, even ignoring the fact that she had arrived without a husband. She wore sunglasses—Chanel, I learned, as she approached—and deep red lipstick.

Hector Composes a Circular Letter to His Friends to Announce His Survival of an Earthquake, 7.8 on the Richter Scale

Mexico City. 23 September, 1985

Dear David,

Knowing that a letter from me has slightly more chance of reaching you across the world than one sent to me here (my local post office is a heap of stone), I’m preempting your question and (I trust) your concern by making the following announcement: I AM ALIVE.

Searching for Intruders

This was while Alethea’s cancer was taking over again, but before we realized it. We had been getting along well again, renting a house back in Reading. There was a heat wave, and we had no air conditioner. It was late, almost 2:00 A.M. We were naked in bed. She was caressing me, and we were about to make love when we heard the screams.

They Whisper

In Vietnamese language school, we sat in lab for two hours every day. We wore headsets and hunkered into vubicles and we talked to Vietnamese speakers on tape, responding to their questions, telling them it is a beautiful morning, thank you very much, I am weary and wish to sleep, can you turn out the light? And we took tests from these tapes, as well, and it was always the same woman’s voice. We had native teachers inour langurage school and finally I got up the nerve to ask someone, but the woman whose voice was on the tape was not one of ours. Nobody knew who she was.

In Between Things

In between things, Parker slept with Rachel. He kept telling himself he wouldn’t do it, even insisted, sometimes out loud, that the mere thought of doing it was completely out of the question.

The Spring House

This story is not currently available online

Balsam

A little awkward, she thought, the morning after your lover has fled, to have breakfast with his mother. A little awkward that the apartment you occupy is attached to her garage, that you haven’t found a job in this little tree-rimmed town full of eclectic approaches to keeping body and soul together. A little awkward that you have no immediate place to go, now that her son has gone.

Kristin’s Uncle Otto

I was struggling with an overgrown border when Sarah’s phone call came. Spring was already galloping ahead. I was heaving out my favourite perennials, pulling them free of the worst of the weeds and dumping them in a heap on the mossy grass. Once this was done, I’d break off anything that was salvageable, heel it into some corner, weed-kill the jungle, then replant. Blitz gardening.

Oh, Such Playwrights!

The cab was a battered canary-yellow Crown Vic, and without question the driver was accelerating in running the traffic signal that had just turned on Ninth Avenue—he must have been doing fifty. When the wailing ambulance arrived from Roosevelt Hospital only a few blocks away, the last thing anybody was thinking about—either the sidewalk bystanders, stunned at what they had witnessed, or the efficient EMS workers—were the scattered sheets of the three copies of the play, let loose from the gray cardboard box that all but detonated in the impact.

Dishonor

After the long trek to Tallil, the President called the whole thing off and they returned by Humvees and Chinooks to Saudi to await further orders. It was in camp there that Phillip beat a boy within an inch of his life, a PFC improbably named Francis China; he’d cut in front of Phillip at chow, possibly unwittingly. The kid probably wasn’t even nineteen. He was nothing to Phillip Dante. Just some kid who’d ended up on the wrong end of his infinite anger.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

At his apartment, after work, him studying from the kind of book you’d keep a door open with. They did not discuss his concern about the licensing exam. She wanted to go out, but he said he really had to study. The fan going. A clean-line apartment building. The walls were all white. He had put up a number of large photographs of him and his father, sailing competitively. Dark blue water and a sharp white sailboat named Madeline, its sails bulging. His mother had taken the photographs. The girlfriend never asked him about this.

Darwin’s Lotus

The evolution of a species was echoed in the evolution of an individual-they rhymed, he’d write, the development and diversification of a progress of an particular feature similar to the progress of an idea-and after tea and biscuits in the basement, after opening the morning’s mail, after tending to his climbing plants in the study, the old man laid the grey heron out on his work table and opened her lengthwise. In the tight crop of the bird he found small stones, bits of shell, of seaweed, a smooth blue fish. In the belly of the fish he found the silver grizzle of a smaller fish. And in that grey paste he found the hard pearl of a berry.

The Silver Bullet

By the summer of 1984, bankruptcy was so close we could taste it. It tasted like beans, which we ate with growing frequency, and it tasted like fear. It tasted like the cigarettes my mother lit one off the next. My father, meanwhile, fell into deep silences. He stood with his arms crossed, contemplating our many orange Herefords, once valuable enough to warrant his near-constant attention, now worth less than three dimes a pound. The cows looked back, chewing their cuds, oblivious to soaring feed prices, unacquainted with terms like “mortgaged” and “remortgaged.” Neighbors came by to look at the equipment, offering such trifling amounts that my father’s face reddened. He turned them down, but they called again, offering less.

In the Mosque of Imam Alwani

This was when they lived in the eternal city. It seemed possible that the trio’s little corner of the Kurdish spring—the square chimneys of the brick kilns unfurling their listing columns of black smoke into the high, clear light, the sloped, red sides of the river, secreted within the ellipses of bank woods and seething with insects in the lambent dawn before the air filled with the clattering gossip of the washerwomen and the collisions of the silver-voiced children worrying its shallows—had, since the beginning of time, continued in just this way in its sounds and habits, relying on no allegiance other than the residents’ curious sense of belief in their own perpetuity. This was when Bajh and Asti and Araz all lived there together, when they were young and the fields and herds still seemed born entirely anew each spring; this was when it was still their city to have.

A Heavy Breath

Her breakfast tasted like whale. It was a perished, fishy flavor that covered everything on her plate. Pauline swallowed her bacon and beans in several masses, leaving only drips of pork fat to be sopped up with yesterday’s bread. She and Ezra ate in silence while the baby slept. When Ezra’s plate was cleaned, he wiped his hands on the linen of the tablecloth, gulped down his coffee and rose to dress for work. He put on his bloodstained clothes.

Stay up with Me

Henry is in the part of the dream where his father carries him piggyback through the shoulder-high waves. His father’s T-shirt is soaked through, and the salt water is making the cut on Henry’s elbow sting, when a woman’s voice calls out, “Henry . . . Henry.”

After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes

Why had Amy gone off for a walk? He knew that her conference—an international gathering of Emily Dickinson scholars—did not begin for another day. Was she angry at him for sleeping so late? The night before, she had quickly brushed her teeth, worn her old nightgown and fallen sleep, but he had stayed awake, jazzed by the long flight from Boston and the taxi ride through the strange city. He’d moved in close to Amy, wanting to feel the curve of her long body, but she’d muttered in her sleep and turned away. Sleep, when it came for him, had been a series of jumbled dreams.

The Wrong Man

On the evening of June 17, 1994, when Al Cowlings drove O.J.’s white Bronco fifty miles down I-405 followed by twenty helicopters and god knows how many police cars, I was working in nearby El Segundo, California, at a halfway house for men, debating what to do with the rest of my life. Through the first half of college I had planned to apply to law school, but my parents had gotten me a job at their firm the summer before my junior year, and most of my time was spent in a storage closet searching cases for mention of water rights, which made law school look much less appealing. That fall I took a social work elective on human development and began working with underprivileged children, a job I liked because it suited my nosy nature and gave me the opportunity to tell people what to do. As a lawyer I would only be involved in one side of a case (and a boring one at that, it seemed), with the verdict left in someone else’s hands, but as a social worker, I learned, I’d be making actual decisions with consequences that would better people’s lives. Plus, I wouldn’t have to go to grad school to start practicing. So I switched majors my junior year and started my job a week after graduation.

The City of the Dead

The first time I went to visit Dr. Hill at Park View, I brought him a bouquet of flowers. It would be six weeks before the headstone would be in, and the grave was gutted-looking still, like new gardening. It all looked a little vulgar and exposed, and I didn’t like to look at it straight—though it was true I’d seen Dr. Hill much more exposed than this. “Don’t get used to this,” I said, laying the flowers at his grave. Dr. Hill didn’t respond, but then he’d never been talkative when I knew him in this life, either.