Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Being [T]Here, Dustin B. Smith

English Faculty Publications

When you awoke from the dream, in your early thirties, you knew, as you’ve never known anything else in all your seventy-plus years, that what you’d found was real. The dream began with you sitting in a church, head bowed in prayer. Your eyes opened slowly, and you noticed that you were wearing brilliantly colored, beaded moccasins. You stood abruptly, pushed open the mahogany gate that separated the pew from the center aisle of the church, and began to run. The dream then proposed a seemingly endless and entirely quotidian set of difficulties in The City, and led eventually to …

Wayward, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

It’s hard to imagine, now, how it was that I took up with that boy in South Carolina, but facts are facts. William Buchanan Redmond was lawless and drawling, full of sideways glances and outrageous proposals. He went by Cannon.

One night on Hilton Head Island, where I was staying with a friend’s family (thanks to private school I had friends with houses on Nantucket, etcetera, though I lived in a modest house with my mother and sister that we were renovating to resell), he approached me at an outdoor concert. A guitarist was playing a sing-along rendition of “Take …

Out Cold, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

Walter had just completed his five-mile route on the treadmill and was headed from the gym to his car in a nearby parking lot - he was in fact circumnavigating a field on which a few idiotic teenagers were kicking a soccer ball at a field hockey goal, so as not to approach near their game - when he was struck in the side and back of his head by something large and forceful and solid and round, and it sent his glasses flying from his face and his bright white tennis cap skittering from his head and it flattened …

In Transit, Kathryn Rhett

English Faculty Publications

There is the birthplace and there is the deathplace. We are in the deathplace. The deathplace is Bad Aibling, in southern Germany, just north of the Austrian border. To get here, we have driven through the Tyrol, the Italian-Austrian-German alpine region in which gingerbread houses stack up on the green slopes of valleys.

Bad Aibling sounds fitting for a deathplace, a bad place, though in fact “bad” means “bath.” As we drive on a two-lane road, we see cars parked in bunches on the grassy shoulder, and it seems people might be bathing, dipping their feet in the country creeks …

My Psychologist, My Psychiatrist, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

I could not distinguish between them except by what we did. I was ten, then eleven. I would not ride the school bus. I always slunk home saying I missed it. I made my mother come to school with me every day, and sit in the lobby so I could wave to her during recess and class changes. In the evenings my father would come home from work, hear my mother's report, and storm upstairs, his weight pounding on the hardwood steps. I would be out of breath with crying, my head in the pillow, waiting to feel what he …

Résumé, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

I sat at the back of a pale classroom and watched my father teach. "Creative Inspiration," my father lectured, "is what you have as soon as you are born and the doctor slaps you on your bottom. That first cry, because you're hungry or tired or just glad to be breathing, is your first creative inspiration." I leaned back in my chair to ease the heat rising in my face. "Incidentally," my father said, grinning at the under graduates, "I've read the Sexual Harassment pamphlet, and I want you all to know I don't slap bottoms." [excerpt]

In Another Country, Fred G. Leebron

English Faculty Publications

That summer we lived in an icebox of a house, where nothing worked. The gas stove was stuck in a chimney that had no fireplace, plaid linoleum covered the chipped and rotting floor, a cold wet wind blew through the cracks in the doors and windows, the light bulbs hummed and fluttered, the clock struck at odd and unwarranted times, and we weren't allowed to drink the water from the sink because it came from an impure place. [excerpt]