Glimmer Train Stories, #93

Lee Montgomery
Window
Spring was sneaky that year Angela ran away.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
The Bears
All of my senses opened in recognition. The mixed scent of newsprint and butter, the muted ticking of the modern cuckoo clock on the wall, the enamel tea kettle gleaming atop the immense stove, the marmalade still sharp in my mouth: home.

Jon Chopan
Slaughter
That was the year it snowed in Baghdad and people thought it was a sign of peace.

Daniel Torday
A Dispatch from Mt. Moriah
My parents weren't the anachronisms that the Sonnensteins were, but they were products of the fifties: men went to work and women worked out the socializing.

Caitlin Horrocks
Norwegian for Troll
After stopping to eat Coney dogs at a place recommended on the internet, they ate more at the Coney shop next door, both founded by immigrant Greek brothers with rival hot dog dynasties.

Michael Conforti
Tunnels
I learned pretty young they always chased the guy who ran, so I did what I could to avoid being that guy.

J.P. Lacrampe
Caretaking
In his chair Jorma sleeps, his eyelids fluttering, and I wonder why his accident didn't hold our family together, like they sometimes do in movies.

Peter Sipe
Civil Affairs
Rwandan soldiers, noted for their relative discipline and skill, were everywhere. Kigali was, for an African city, a pretty orderly place.

Bob Shacochis
Interview by Kevin Rabalais
A lot of us had been arrested in anti-war demonstrations at our schools. Then those kids all got summer intern jobs at the C.I.A.

Sean Bernard
Museum of Me
Mid-life crisis is my dad's dumb theory. I think she's mad, mad that I'm my own woman, mad that boys like me, mad that I don't give her attention the way I used to.

Analisa Raya-Flores
The Boys Like Bones
The thing about anaphylaxis is it isn't just physiological. The allergy attacks your logic, your sense of reality. My favorite on the list of symptoms is a "sense of impending doom."

Courtney Sender
Even Angels Are Astonished
Lydia is on the phone, crying, which doesn't concern Ari; Lydia is a crier like him, unlike her mother. There's a strength in the ability to cry, he believes and has taught her.

David H. Lynn
Divergence
For months he'd been predicting that promotion would alter nothing, that he wouldn't feel in any way transformed once it had been granted.

Mojie Crigler
Completely Everything Completely Burned
Holes in the ground, and double-holes, where the trees--roots, trunk, bark, branches, leaves, rings, sap, snake nests, unhatched bird eggs--completely burned away.

Judy Doenges
Promised Land
There was neither meadow nor glen, but there was a huge lawn and a cluster of ranch houses, a lot of exhausted wealthy people from the local towns of St. Charles and Geneva, and me.

Philip Tate
Reading Hemingway
"Maybe it will last," she said. "We should make it last."