It’s like they’re mocking me. Can’t they do that somewhere else? Making out; right outside the window. I hate them.
It was one minute past midnight and he still has not showed. This wasn’t the first time. And there was always some excuse. The kids were sick. The wife needed him to do something. What was it going to be this time?
Read MoreDaniel sat there beside that mound of dirt. His heart was broken. He had lost his best friend in the world.
Read MoreFor a five-year-old sharecropper’s son, every season is like a new life. The passage of time does not seem to register. All I knew was that the weather started warming up and Daddy started plowing the fields and planting the cotton. The bare-limbed trees in the forest that surrounded our house began to turn green. The grass in the front yard started growing again. Soon Daddy would be out there on Saturday mornings with a sling blade, mumbling words I was not supposed to repeat. The tall weeds and bushes on the side of the house, out past the clothesline, sometimes produced baby bunnies that would sleepily sun themselves, just this side of the tall weeds … until I tried to run and catch one.
Read MoreOn a cool overcast spring morning, two old friends walk along an asphalt path that cuts through the forest of a local park. As they round a corner into an open area, the sun peeks through the clouds, lighting up the little clearing in front of them and bathing them in warmth. Lillian’s red linen blouse glistens.
Read MoreWhen I was six years old, my father gave up farming on our little sharecropper's farm and got a factory job. We moved a few miles down the road to an old frame house with a tin roof, with the new luxury of running water. The house had a dirt front yard and an outhouse in back. It was a white house, sorely in need of paint, with a crumbling gray-colored front porch, a house quite close to the paved country road but surrounded by forest on three sides. Although small by today’s standards, it was a mansion compared to the three-room shack where I spent my first six years.
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