I “I want to know once and for all who did this to me!” hollered Hugh Jackson III, waving his stubbed hands dramatically for all to witness (and seeming to startle himself more than the rest of us). This was the climax of a speech he had prepared for me and the local policemen on the morning of my arrival in New Iberia. I had come to investigate a six-month
The confessional. The dark side of the human soul. I hear it all. Things done in desperation, good Catholics laid low by what seem on the surface to be simple venial sins. My name is Rick Sterling. What few friends I have call me “Father.” I’m nobody’s pal. I’m a priest. It was a sweltering August night. The type of humid night that makes a rosary slip from a man’s
Charlie approached the steam table, held his steel tray out above the sneeze guard, and waited to be served. Sylvia, the blue-aproned lunch attendant, held her spoon poised and waited for his order. Charlie, though, was silent. “Meatloaf?” she offered at last. Charlie shook his head. “Soy burger?” Sylvia asked. Charlie shook his head. Behind him, queued students fidgeted. “Beans?” A shake of the head. “Fruit cup?” “No,” Charlie said.
It’s an old railroad style house fronting a thin street, not far from the train tracks and stockyards. Cole comes out the front door for a moment to check on his motorcycle; he won’t be staying long, but it’s dusk and he knows the neighborhood. The icy wind stings his face like bees. He’s visiting Lillian, his mother. She’s invited him here, as she does once in a blue moon,
As Bill Fuller walked down the sidewalk, he passed a woman with a face like a fist. She glanced at him quickly with an embarrassed look, as if to say she knew the damage she had done to herself over the years through bad lifestyle choices. She would be cursed with that bloated, creased, and tortured appearance to the day she died. Bill thought about how normal she could have
“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Ray dutifully reminded himself as he watched his left shoe, and then his right shoe, pass each other on the sidewalk below, looking from his vantage point like compact autos negotiating a tiny two-lane road. If one could even call it that, given a buckling surface strewn with cigarette butts and used tissue papers and rubble – were it a road, heaven
