The library was packed, and I mentally cursed myself for coming in broad daylight. I avoided eye contact with the librarian because I still hadn’t returned that chemistry book I borrowed two months ago. I was pretty sure I had lost it. I still hated the library, but I couldn’t deny the beauty of the … Continue reading
He cleaned up in anticipation of her arrival. He made things look right. He dusted the tables, the lamps, the curtains and the shelving. He pulled out books and CDs and cleaned behind them. He sprayed cleanser on the TV screen and wiped it clean. Everywhere he looked, dust. In places, the dust, beggar’s velvet … Continue reading
No one can convince me they aren’t out there. Just two or three blocks away, oh yes. I know it; feel it. My mind keeps seeing them sitting there in a black Ford panel truck; I see them hunched over their machines, wearing this special electronic gear they have, taping everything. Yeah. I’ve read about … Continue reading
If you considered it from different angles, the jarring effect of Marina’s nose was lessened, but never erased. When she wasn’t there, I wondered if hers was a face I could wake up to each morning. No. My honest, spontaneous answer: No. But I didn’t like this honest, spontaneous answer of mine, nor the me … Continue reading
Rebecca Williams had the brightest smile you’d ever seen. Maybe it wasn’t pure white, but the way she smiled was so sincere that it radiated warmth and light. She had a gap, not between her two front teeth, but between the pointy one and the flat one directly four to the left of that. You’d … Continue reading
Somebody said he was a stone hauler with a broken heart. Whoever he was he drove up to Eagle Mountain the night before Thanksgiving with a quart of Wild Turkey and a .357 Magnum. The sheriff found him around sunup. By noon the news was all over town. We were shooting pool when the wrecker … Continue reading
Zune: (see zoon) n. An individual animal produced from an egg. Despite the various calls she had made in the past few weeks complaining about the matter, when Nora opened her front door on Sunday morning she found that, yet again, her newspaper had been dropped at an unacceptable distance from her front step. Nora … Continue reading
I must look like a zombie, she says, wiping underneath her eyes. It’s this new organic eyeliner. I don’t know what it does to my face. Organic eyeliner? I ask. My hand shifts on her bare back. She stops to answer, but she doesn’t know what makes eyeliner organic. She says: It’s not tested on … Continue reading
The ocean feels far away in the dry redness. The succulents and cacti and scrub are too brown or too washed-out green to cut through the aching and endless brightness. Dilapidated fences of powdering wooden stakes and ancient strands of barbed wire run parallel to the road. Asphalt is bleached white by the sun and … Continue reading
A group of boys lines up on the third-base side of an overgrown ball field, kicking sneaker toes at the chalky earth and chewing on the sides of their fingers. The sun above them pulses and stares, the wind having died to nothing, but the boys stand still and content and thirsty, waiting to be … Continue reading
Coe Review 