Books

A Few Excerpts from Attempting Flight…

•There are photographs of a small dark man. His teeth are very white and he smiles with his mouth open, as if he is laughing. Nicolo knows this man is his father. When his mother isn’t looking, he stands on a stool in front of the mirror and tries to make his face look like the face of the man in the photos. He holds his head up, thrusts one shoulder back and forces himself to laugh with his mouth open. There. I can do it too, he tells himself. I am the son of this man. (From the story “The Landscape of Aphrodite’s Body”).

•When they went out into the corridor to stretch their legs, he imagined he was in one of those foreign films where women smoke like men and men lean out of train windows. He wanted to hear a concertina playing French ballads over the rhythmic sound of iron wheels clattering along the track. He felt emptied and self-satisfied. (From the story “Remembering Maggie”).

•At night Yola pulls the blanket over me and my twin sister. Her brown face is lined with deep wrinkles and there is a bucket of skin under each eye. I think she is beautiful like this. She has looked this way as long as I can remember. Yola wears tennis shoes. White ones. My mother buys them for her at Walmart, (From the story “Yola Wears Tennis Shoes”).

•Cynthia is in a corner of the play yard. Crouched, hidden in the shadow of a huge tree, next to a crude rabbit hutch. She cries quietly as she watches the large brown rabbit munch tough green curls of kale. She is four years old, small for her age, with huge black eyes. I approach her quietly and ask “Que paso? Que paso, Cynthia?” The small child has no answer and I sit down next to her in the dirt. I am a pre-school teacher and Cynthia is in my class. There is something about this child that touches my heart. Lately she has been very emotional, difficult to deal with. (From the story “Cynthia”).

•Every night we met at a local pub, drank a few beers and then headed down the road to a tunnel under the train tracks, where we sat on cold rocks and smoked cigarettes. Bayard played the guitar and sang folk songs, political songs and Spanish ballads that he never translated for me. I was transfixed, watching him, his long fingers moving up and down the neck of his guitar, his dark eyes filling with tears. (From the story “Bayard”).

•My mother’s main chore every summer, besides dabbling at housework, is to attain and maintain a beautiful tan. She spends hours lying on a lounge chair in the back yard, where she torments her sun-darkened skin on a daily basis. Slithered in olive oil, she flips from front to back like a hamburger, until I imagine I can hear a faint sizzling sound. Then she goes upstairs to take a bubble bath and comes down fresh and sparkling, her long legs polished with lotion, toenails painted slick and shiny, smelling of Chanel #5. (From the story Naked Tomatoes)

•Elliot remembers meeting Maggie in the Amsterdam train station, waiting for the train to take them to Rome. He had been traveling alone for several weeks, a pseudo hippie in jeans and a ripped leather jacket, growing his beard and his hair in an attempt to create a new persona. He was, actually, a fairly conservative engineering student at the University of Pittsburgh, acting on a whim. (From the story Remembering Maggie)

•It had been almost eight months since Delia died. Porter still awoke each morning slightly startled to see the empty space beside him in the bed. It had not been a sudden death. And even though he had been beside her, watching the dark storm breathe through her body, taking away parts of her until there was nothing left, it seemed that one morning she had simply disappeared. Like all those people in Argentina or Chile he read about. Disappeared. (From the story Annabel Embraces the Day)

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