By: Ruth Z Deming I planned my getaway from my husband as carefully as a bank robber planning a heist. I was used to lying to Jack, my husband of twenty years, so when I said, “Let’s take separate cars to…
By: David Jordan He sat at the bar nursing his second pint of stout, feeling boozy and depressed. He didn’t feel like drinking. He felt like walking. Outside would be nice and cold. So he got up off his stool and…
By: Gaither Stewart Professor Emiliano Madero liked to profess publicly that he felt he was in the midst of an epic battle between the two gods of ancient Mexico: Quetzalcoatl, the hero–founder of agriculture and industry, and Tezcatlipoca, the ubiquitous…
By: Jeffrey Miller The day Emily finally got around to boxing up her late husband’s clothes to donate to Goodwill he broke her heart one last time. For months, she painstakingly hung onto them as though this simple act would guarantee…
By: William T. Hathaway I’m an ad designer in N.ew York — I like it and am good at it. I’ve always loved beauty and try to bring some of it into every ad I design. But my love of…
By: Michael C. Keith There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory. –– Josh Billings Billy-John Calhoun saddled up his horse, Rickets, in the corral of his windblown homestead north of Ashby, Nebraska, and rode it…
By: Steve Slavin Almost everything I know about women I learned from Bonnie. Although she was just 21 – two years my junior – she already knew more than most people learn in a lifetime. Bonnie was kind of pretty,…
By: William J. Watkins, Jr. For Garland Breazeale, his garden patch was a refuge. An Eden prior to the Fall. But on recent Saturday mornings, before the sun began its climb up the eastern sky, the patch would change. Garland had…
By: Clive Aaron Gill Martha steered her pickup truck down the steep road from Valley Center towards the Escondido High School bus yard. Dawn spread its pink-rose rays over morning clouds, softening the San Diego mountain peaks. She hunched her…
By: Michael C. Keith What you wear to the grave is always safe from criticism. –– Sander Howling Alison asked her 81 year-old spouse what clothes he wanted to wear at his wake. “Huh? That’s a weird thing to say….