We were told that the dog’s name was “Beauty”. Even that was a lie. When we looked at her papers it was clear that her name was: “Queenie”. She was a Great Dane Dalmation, a huge, slender, majestic beast of…

What nourishes us as writers? My immediate answer is : sharing what we write with others, so they recognize the person who wrote it, or is writing it, as being alive and present in the world. In other words, what…

I pulled into my parking space and told my mother, "We're here!" In a deadened, disappointed tone that I hadn’t heard since I was thirteen years old, she responded, "We're where." I suddenly saw the moment through her eyes –…

[Fiction] She drifts. That's what it feels like in the afternoons, after the chemical feeling wears off, as if she's been injected with a substance meant to keep her on edge. But she hasn't taken anything. How can she, when…

The small assembly hall at Friedrich Wilhelm University rang with applause. Families and friends were seated in rows of before the balcony. The graduating students faced the auditorium looking out toward the crowd of glowing faces. The majority of the…

Late one afternoon, Cathy was hitchhiking on the narrow two-lane road between Portland and her home outside of Camden, Maine and he picked her up. As people did in those innocent 1970s, they took up with each other in a…

I think of the years, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands when humans, like me, addressed themselves to the silent gods that ruled, or so they thought, their lives and circumstances. Prayers, utterances, chants. Hope. Faith. Do they live somewhere in…

Silence. Pure, cotton-soft silence that makes all the muscles in your ears relax and heal from the injurious noises of the world….a kind of healing your eyes experience when allowing them to peer out at an infinite horizon…..emptiness so pure…

What if, on the other side of all effort, when all is spent down, breath, energy, intellect— all departs, the soul departs to an afterlife— there is nothing? Not a single muscle fiber firing without breath, without silent steady pulsation…

I found the light in the crevice between the counter and the stove. Just a tiny glow in a thin line of space. I wouldn't have noticed it if I weren't trying to rescue a crumb from falling over the…

All the radios on her father's work bench were quiet. The dials were alive, and searching for a signal but never finding one. He had taughter her what switch to turn on the microphone when she spoke, but not how…