Category: Creative Prose

We had arrived there on roads much like the only roads we had ever known. Read More …

She is a woman.  Some might still call her young, though she has moved through it.  She has seen too much life to be classed with those daughters. It takes more experience than you might suppose to wear black knowingly: to carry off a little darkness on her back: to proudly lead and remind the Read More …

History textbooks used to report historical fact.  The good ones might even try to analyze the significance of some events, some movements.  But so little history has occurred over the past century that we only ever read about otherwise long-forgotten people, places, and the things that made them noteworthy.  There is no desire to know Read More …

— She was Stephanie, and I was young enough to think she was the whole world entire. There is a time for a young man, before he knows anything else of a woman, that he believes all and any sustenance he will ever need is in her hand. If he could only glance his fingers Read More …

An end brought the rain, and the rain broke the heat.   Those with AC wouldn’t know it, but fall has arrived, its coming authority spoken through the harbinger of a cool morning.  Houses always at 68° have forgotten. The memories seep through my flannel stale with a mothball tang of last winter’s wardrobe.  The Read More …

Were your soles wet or tickled by the flat reflection of that mountain lake?  Are you here to save me? Miles and miles around the shore become only a mile straight. Twenty minutes of step over step become a flash unreal: action as a memory, the tedium compressed into a single instance of impatience and Read More …

I cannot help reading with curious, wandering eyes.  I would be more efficient at home, but I do not pick up a book just to have it done.  Reading is an experience, each book, something better shared with others, though they probably have little knowledge of the interaction.  Do I? Yes.  I know what I Read More …

Why would a man as young as I am purchase a house as old and worn and tired as this?  How lowly must a man value his time to adopt a responsibility so unflaggingly constant?  How lonely?  Nothing here will appreciate.  There is no return from day to day. But it is mine.  Undeniably mine. Read More …

Two too bright lights come fast over the crest of the hill.  Fast enough to make me nervous for my back end.  And my neck.  But the assumed high-performance engine must be complemented by high-performance brakes.  And both meet the road with high-performance tires.  He began braking soon after topping the hill and slowed to Read More …

*Adapted from Charles Dickens’ “Bill-Sticking,” first published in Household Words on March 2, 1851* — If I had an enemy whom I hated – which heaven forbid! – and if I knew of something which sat heavily on his conscience, I think I would introduce that something into an advertising campaign and place control of Read More …