No More Sister than St. Nick
August 29, 2023[…] had not asked Vernie to prepare and narrate the Christmas program. For the first time in twenty -seven years, the bishop of the West Bench Ward had not called on him, with his BYU […]
[…] had not asked Vernie to prepare and narrate the Christmas program. For the first time in twenty -seven years, the bishop of the West Bench Ward had not called on him, with his BYU […]
Listen to the Out Loud version of the piece here. Masked and gowned, Isa stood in the corner of the operating room next to his son Cael. Three surgeons stood around the operating table […]
[…] Island. She had discovered faithless Milton in flagrante delicto with a charming French girl—long legged and twenty -something—whom Sue had been foolish enough to hire for some light cleaning and miscellaneous duties. She’d ignored […]
[…] brings it back to her now. Then she realizes what: today is her birthday, she is eighty -four. The same age Inez Mayfield had been when she died. Helen looks up at her son […]
[…] a ways to go to acclimate fully to his new home; words like “folks” and the single -syllable pronunciation of words like “believe” (“blieve”), and the relentless shaking of hands that was almost competitive […]
[…] a week the teenage girl from across the hall, always heavily made up and in a low -cut v–neck t–shirt, knocked at our door. To practice her English, she’d tell us coyly, snapping a […]
[…] eyes. There was the tire shop, and the gas station with the dinosaur. There was the four -wheeler place with the sun–bleached mannequin in a tattered BYU t–shirt. A man in the shade of […]
Since he was a child, he’d dreamed of himself in one form and woken up, always disappointed, always jolted by the reality and by the way that others looked at him. In the first years,…
[…] wave them over. So, once I calmed down, once I pulled off the diagonal strip of twenty -first–century traffic signals, franchises, and cheap motel chains, I thought to find a little takeout Mexican place. […]
[…] needed at least a few hours of sleep. All was as it should be—her dark oak four -poster bed, stilted to an over–moderate height above the floor so that a small ladder was necessary […]