The young man had just missed his previously-ticketed flight from LAX, but the ticket agent, a middle-aged woman with hair dyed a brilliant auburn color, managed to get him booked on the very next flight to Charlotte. The ticket agent wore...
One otherwise unremarkable July day, Nikifor Alexandrovich Rosanov, the highest ranking janitor of Lenin’s Mausoleum and hence of the entire Russian Republic, quit his job. Though he quit voluntarily, he told everyone he was laid off. As a...
It can seem ironic only in retrospect that the plans for my wedding lasted as long as the marriage itself—14 months. The night before the ceremony in August 1995, I did not know the fate of the second 14 months, but I knew the dread and...
He remembers the heat, the first summer in Norfolk, the summer of ‘69. He remembers the way it felt as it radiated from the steel decks, rising so fast that it pulled the breath out of his lungs. He remembers bringing it home on his uniform...
Through the window next to his bed, Buddy watched his father build a wire cage to house a light bulb to keep the bougainvillea bush warm. The weatherman had warned that it would get down to the 20’s that night, a record low for Houston. As...
He knew Lucas Beauchamp—as well as any white person knew him. Better than any maybe unless it was Carothers Edmonds on whose place Lucas lived seventeen miles from town, because he had eaten a meal in Lucas’s house. It was in the early...
