Story Excerpts
Fortnight in D Minor
[published in
Redivider]
“You have a daughter,” I said into the phone. “You have,” but it was still ringing, “a daughter.”
It rang one more time and when a woman answered it I hung up because she didn’t have a daughter. Or if she did it was a different one.
I called again later and this time he answered.
“You,” I said. Then my voice failed.
“Hello?”
My daughter, our daughter, was practicing her violin in the next room.
“Hello?” he said several times. Then he finally stopped asking Hello and just listened to his daughter’s Minuet in D Minor all the way until the end. I held the phone for a long time after I hung up.
Earthquake in Indiana
She thought the dawn earthquake was one of the trains she hears and often feels, especially at night, as it lumbers like a brawny man, one who slings axes and tells tall tales, on its wild way to elsewhere.
For Sale By Owner
Reader, may I be frank? I wish to speak frankly of my marriage. I married Frank because the first time I saw him, he was bent over tying his shoe, like my father was on the last morning before he floated away from me. It was my first year of cutting hair after years of painting rivers, and I was old enough to marry this image of my father and—I imagined—to stop what my mother couldn’t.
No, that is not why I married Frank. That is why I noticed Frank. I married Frank because he turned out to be nothing like my father after all.
