Jan 18, 2020 | Featured, Lies, Truth & Lies |
Every now and then, Farewell burst into excessively sonorous laughter. At each of these guffaws, I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. He looked like the god Pan, or Bacchus in his den, or some demented Spanish conquistador ensconced in a southern fort. The...
Jan 11, 2020 | Travel, Truth, Truth & Lies |
In her hut in Poto-Poto, the poor quarter of Brazzaville, the feticheuse, smiling at us, knelt on the floor, drew out a handful of cowrie shells from the cloth bag at her waist, and cast them across the raffia mat. Lary Shaffer and I, despite ourselves, leaned forward...
Dec 21, 2019 | Lies, Truth & Lies |
The things she catches Doug-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse. Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and...
Dec 7, 2019 | Lies, Truth & Lies |
But depression wasn’t the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness,...
Nov 30, 2019 | Lies, Truth & Lies |
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture int he demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t ring. When Chloe called a few days later, I had rehearsed my speech too often to deliver it correctly. I was caught unprepared, handing socks on a rail. I ran to the...
Nov 23, 2019 | Lies, Truth & Lies |
A five year-old in 1968 paints a picture. What’s in it? First, a mother, giver of paper and paints, saying Make me something beautiful. Then a house with a door floating in the air, and a chimney with curls of spiraling smoke. Then four Appich children in...