Nearly every year of my thirty-nine years of teaching eighth grade I gave my students the same final assignment.  I asked my students to consider the perfect career for you and why.  I collected those in a stack on my desk.  I tapped the bunch together three or four times to make an even bundle, snapped a rubberband around the pile, and dropped them into my school bag.  Each semester I may have intended to read them and each year I couldn’t bear to.

 

the corner store

6:20 a.m.

In the whole of Riverside Cemetery this was the one stone that had slipped its mooring, leaned not forward into the new millennium, but backward, into the one passed by mere years ago, as if saying it was tired of all the holding on. In one instant the scribed name was home with me: Dumont Pulsifier, an old pal from my neighborhood, but everybody, including his mother and his dead father while he was here, had called him “Scratch.”

 

If I Were Young Again

 

My father nods in a sulking fashion.  He came to dispense his riches, but now must carry them all to his grave, bearing him down six feet plus all the way to China.  I don’t feel sorry or sympathy for him; he buttered his own bread and now he must sleep in it.  No exoneration for the old man, as far as I’m concerned.  He had his chance many years ago when, under the spell of some sentimental fancy, he gave me away to the gypsies, buttoned my coat, told me to be good, mind my manners, and help out as best I could with the dishes and the hand laundry and the pick-pocketing and pan-handling and the recruiting of other able-bodied and willing children.

 

The Night Watchman

Restoration

 Titles

Goddess of Nomads, Peregrines, and Wanderers

 Heart as Imaginary Island

 

Deciphering Fools

The man lay completely flat on the ground. His feet were the only thing possessed with any tension, offering up resistance to the pull of the earth under them. His eyes were closed and his head seemed empty. We stepped over his arm and began to go on our way when a loud voice hit our ears from behind.

Snow fell around as he lingered near the path’s entrance.  There was a constant wealth of activity nearby as it was midday and students were heading home from their cancelled classes.  A car passed by Sam in the other lane, slowed, and stopped.  Inside was his English professor, Louis Berry.  “Afternoon, Mr. Riley,” the professor called out over the car’s engine and music wafting out from the half opened window.  “On your way to becoming our department’s own Thoreau?” he asked, pointing to the deep forest that surrounded them.  Sam took a moment to register the professor’s reference, as he wasn’t one for the aforementioned author.  “Nah,” he replied, “just going for a jog.”  The professor smiled.