temperature would have been below freezing. He jumped in darkness. One of the two parachutes he wore was a nonfunctioning instructional chute, accidentally included with the four chutes Cooper demanded. (Naysayers point to Cooper’s inability to recognize the dummy chute as justification for the argument that Cooper was an inexperienced skydiver.) Below him stretched cloud cover and rain at 5,000… [Read More]

in the field risking her life for a photograph, but while sitting in the backseat of my brother-in-law’s car. At the time, my sister Marla and her husband Paul lived in a house on an oil storage tank reserve where he worked as an engineer in a tiny town called Piney Point, Maryland. With my parents in the backseat, Paul… [Read More]

passing in the hall culminated in the murmur of strangers. Because the nurses were arranging Benito just so, Pilar sat in a chair by the room’s window instead of going to him. She didn’t want to interrupt them, and the way they shifted his limbs gave his unconscious form a strange animation, detached yet effusive. They taped tubes to his… [Read More]

of the next term. She should have been applying for positions, should have been making contacts, should have been actively involved in shaping her own future. But this job had fallen into her lap, unsolicited, in much the same way that any accomplishment in her life had come to pass thus far: through happenstance and coincidence. She’d sold a novel… [Read More]

redo in fair copy.” But the people were not interested. One time he was in East Oakland. It was an old, gray building, nondescript. The steps were gray and dirty, they had not been swept in some time. Here and there were some puddles — were they from the recent rains? He climbed the steps, came to a long hallway…. [Read More]

feel it strange, merely inevitable, that he should see her again, the woman from the beach, this time weaving her way through the other pedestrians into a restaurant a few doors down from the hotel where Martin stood. He left the empty hotel room and walked into the hot night. A force compelled him, a need, a hair-thin line stretching… [Read More]

focused a light on her face, and leaned in, his red beard showing hints of gray beneath his plastic face shield. “Let’s take a look. Open.” Helen obeyed again. His tie was dotted with tiny Elmer Fudds, mimicking the ruddy, round face inches from hers. “Okay, now bite down on this paper. Open again. Hmm. Bite again. Okay, I think… [Read More]

same in relation to her red hair and blue-green eyes, inherited from her father. Emily wanted to stay with her father in Sherman instead of coming here, but he has a new girlfriend and Emily’s presence, he said, would be inconvenient now. There was a time between her parents’ separation and divorce when her father wanted her to spend all… [Read More]

…in February, 240 in March, 205 in April, 262 in May, 313 in June, 286 in July, 336 in August, 298 in September, 359 in October (a historical record), 198 in November, and 221 in December. That’s more than three thousand murders in a city with, at most, 1.3 million inhabitants. I say “at most” because certainly the population has… [Read More]

and so he slid down in his seat and inhaled deeply. Within a few moments, he fell asleep and soon after his hand slipped to the right. The truck veered off the highway in a series of catastrophic jolts, which woke them both. Catherine screamed in a child’s pitch — high, practiced and unashamed — while Samuel came to with… [Read More]

…it’s too far to walk just to sit on a blanket. The people reading in chairs tire me too — How do they manage to be so relaxed? Does it require a lifetime of practice? — while the whiteness of vans in the sun echoes through the parking lot. Those lines in the lawn become wavy near the lot. As… [Read More]

with each other: a whispering feet speech. I could hear him smiling, confirming himself into my language. When the doors opened again we were there, and I waited for the guards to come in and tell us that we weren’t supposed to be there and take us into custody and lock us in. He would take my hand and we… [Read More]