Fiction
Recommended
And
The association of man and woman In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— A dignified and commodious sacrament. Two by two, necessarye coniunction, T. S. Eliot Amos enjoyed her company, but he felt lost. Despite the many times they had walked…
The Six-Buck Fortune
I remember that day perfectly—every violet plum with its orange smudges, the rim of the huge blue canning kettle smeared with thick yellow slime and little tatters of purple peel. It was the day I…
The Chastity Gum
It wasn’t like Sister Farley to chew gum. She took her stewardship over her little swarm of Beehive girls seriously, and normally she was the very soul of decorum, showing us by her dress and…
Songs
Marta Pillahuel was very old. She lived in the country with her pigs on one side and her chickens on the other. Her wooden house leaned to the east and let in the weather—a warm…
Of Pleasures and Palaces
(1961) I sat waiting in the downstairs living room in the “House of Happiness” where only a correct, efficient, middle-aged nurse interrupted a grueling aura of lost wills, defeated pluck. The inmates, whose residence in…
Outsiders
My friend Junie and I were Utah Mormons. We knew no blacks till we were teenagers. The summer I was sixteen and she eighteen, the Peace Corps hired Dad to train volunteers. It was then…
Heart of the Fathers
The Child is father to the Man Wordsworth You wake before the alarm you’d set for 4:30. You dress, almost ritually, and decide to fast. Today of all days you must maintain the proper mood—and…
Bird of Paradise
A drum was beating that night as my family and I entered the elementary school gymnasium. Animal skins were stretched across a portion of hollowed-out tree, two flat brown hands pounding on their surface. Instantly…
They Did Go Forth
Tildy Elizabeth sat by the cradle, Book of Mormon open on her knee. One hand rocked absently while the other traced in painful concentration the small print, dim in the yellow lamplight. Some time ago…
Pancha Loca
Pancha Robinson was doing dishes at her mother’s sink and watching her husband Rick, who was out in the backyard with the children. Gloria, Pancha’s sister, was sitting at the kitchen table fiddling with a…