Rita Zumpano was the topic of neighborhood gossip, a widow who’d gotten over the death of her husband a decade ago, a woman who lit no candles at church, who favored floral patterns over black, who took tango lessons at the community center.
Exotic
Rest Stop
Jacee worked at the Waffle House on I-95 in Haswick, Georgia going on five years. She’d started the day after graduating high school when her mother told her to get a job or “move on.”
Feras Terrae
As if to remind you that, regardless of what they say, you yourself are an island. Nothing but the grass grows there.
The Backlands
Sonny, face deadpan, flings his ballpoint across the reflective marble of the conference table. It flies with unintended precision, hitting his older sister Maya in the center of her chest like a dart. A tentative smile twitches across her face, because he’s fifty-six and he’s never been good at anger, never had reason to be. The pen was the best he could manage.
Death Sure Changes a Person
The first time I saw Lucille after she died, she told me, “You better find someone new, Harlan, or you’ll be lonely.”
Unacceptable Conventions
Before she died, Dr. Candice Mittleton, an employee of Friendly Morgues Inc., the body storage facility that is associated, somewhat loosely, with Upper Valley Hospital, was habituated to addressing me as someone many years her junior. She acted in that manner despite the fact that I was her boss and despite the fact that I was decades older. Even when a mutual colleague, Seth Huffington, publicly protested that behavior, Dr. Mittleton responded to his remonstration with laughter.