Literature

6IN THE READY ROOM of the French Landing P.D., the phone on the desk rings. Bobby Dulac has been mining for nose-gold. Now he squashes his latest treasure on the…

5WE GLIMPSED A janitor on our whirlwind early-morning tour of Maxton Elder Care ?? do you happen to remember him? Baggy overalls? A wee bit thick in the gut? Dangling…

4THREE YEARS AGO, our old friend traveled down this stretch of 93 in the passenger seat of Dale Gilbertson’s old Caprice, his heart going crazy in his chest, his throat…

3OUT TYLER’S WINDOW we go, away from Libertyville, flying southwest on a diagonal, not lingering now but really flapping those old wings, flying with a purpose. We’re headed toward the…

2CHIPPER’S BACKGROUND we know. Alice arrived at Maxton’s from a big house on Gale Street, the old part of Gale Street, where she outlived two husbands, raised five sons, and…

1RIGHT HERE AND NOW, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here: about two hundred feet, the height…

You take me to a place I never go, You send me kisses made of gold, I ‘ll place a crown upon your curls, All hail the Queen of the…

It snowed for Christmas ?? a polite six inches of powder that made the carollers working the streets of Sanford look like they belonged in It’s a Wonderful Life. By…

I reached for Ki with the part of my mind that had for the last few weeks known what she was wearing, what room of the trailer she was in,…

Ki lay fast asleep just as I had left her, on her side with the filthy little stuffed dog clutched under her jaw. It had put a smudge on her…

At first the door wouldn’t open. The knob turned under my hand so I knew it wasn’t locked, but the rain seemed to have swelled the wood . . ….

After that I was mostly in the zone. I came out a few times ?? when that scratched-out scrap of genealogy fell from inside one of my old steno books,…

For men, I think, love is a thing formed of equal parts lust and astonishment. The astonishment part women understand. The lust part they only think they understand. Very few…

Inspiration isn’t always a matter of ghosts moving magnets around on refrigerator doors, and on Tuesday morning I had a flash that was a beaut. It came while I was…

The murk came back and transformed that Sunday night’s dusk into a thing of decadent beauty. The sun turned red as it slid down toward the hills and the haze…

I was finally able to get into the zone, but couldn’t do anything once I got there. I keep a steno pad handy for notes ?? character lists, page references,…

I was walking north along The Street. Japanese lanterns lined it, but they were all dark because it was daylight ?? bright daylight. The muggy, smutchy look of mid-July was…

I didn’t see them at first, which wasn’t surprising; it seemed that half of Castle Rock was on the town common as that sultry Saturday afternoon edged on toward evening….

The telephone was ringing. I climbed toward it from a drowning dream where I couldn’t catch my breath, rising into early sunlight, wincing at the pain in the back of…

I climbed the stairs to the deck instead of going around to the front door, still moving slowly and marvelling at how my legs felt twice their normal weight. When…