Substitute Player

All these years later, I still find Barney’s logic compelling. We needed mitts before the start of the season. We couldn’t squeeze the money from the pittance they called our allowances. After expenses, and what the church extorted in those little envelopes, nothing was left for new equipment,

Wind Prints III

I usually have to tell my students to question the meanings of photographs and the motives of photographers, but not her. I sense instead, whatever I tell her, she’s wondering why.

Wind Prints II

People and things are so easy to lose it’s a wonder we end up anywhere with anything to show. The future too is insecure and can be misplaced as easily as the little pocket items of the past—

Wind Prints I

A steady breeze billows the laundry on the line in photograph after black-and-white photograph along the gallery walls. Dad says they make the breeze visible.

Alphabet Soup

I don’t know this man across the table but if we’re dating, I’m a reasonably lucky woman, depending on my age, my looks. I don’t know much. A plate of eggs and bacon before him, scrambled soft, I believe they call it and nearby, toast in uneven stacks, so the meal is underway. Is this breakfast?

Bridge Toll

My son’s a nice enough kid, I suppose, flaky as all get-out, but a hard worker when he sets his mind to something, which is the problem. I offered him a way into the business, but he never cracked the binder. Plus, he qualified for military officer training, but he went kamikaze on his interview.

Invention of Love

We were born and nearly raised by the time love was invented. Just after the big bombs went off, it was, when parents went looking for hope and found it in their suddenly nuclear families.

One Step Back

The day I nearly lost him, he was such a little man. Rolling his miniature suitcase down the concourse with his boarding pass, threading his way through the taller adults, he looked back just once like a confident boy friend, roguish that he was in the lead, then disappeared from the face of the earth, a suddenly vulnerable child without his mother.

The Paperboy

He climbs the same hill every day and, until there’s a day without news, the papers will keep on coming. At his age, he already knows to come down hard one foot at a time and press his whole weight onto that pedal, to lean his body over the basket, and look uphill, and swing his ropy shoulders above the handlebars and lead with his head forward, to overbalance the load that loves the ground and the machine that wants to roll backwards.

Arms and the Boy

Rumors of my death are only slightly exaggerated, son. I’m so close to dying I taste ashes. There’s little time for me to atone for a lifetime of neglect—of you, I mean; I didn’t neglect much—but, no matter, this should do it. It’s more than a will; it’s your life from here forward.