by Carolyn Waggoner | Sep 26, 2017 | Fiction |
What you grinning at, monkey boy? I sigh imperceptibly and close my gilded eyelids without a sign. Why is it that men of a certain age with pale, knobby, varicose-bedeviled legs insist on wearing shorts, socks, and sandals whenever and wherever they vacation? Or the...
by Carolyn Waggoner | Apr 15, 2017 | Fiction |
The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the Loss of the “Titanic”) Thomas Hardy, 1912 and 1914 1 In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity, And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she. 2 Steel chambers, late the pyres Of her salamandrine fires,...
by Carolyn Waggoner | Feb 14, 2017 | Fiction
Stella Zelinsky sat at the kitchen table, absently stirring her cooling coffee, into which she had just poured a few ounces of orange juice. Even more absently, she gazed at the middlespace (her husband for twenty-seven long years, Herb) who sat between Stella and the...
by Carolyn Waggoner | Jan 5, 2017 | Fiction, Humor, Polemics, Politics |
The shepherd will tend his sheep. The valley will bloom again. And Jimmy will go to sleep In his own little room again. There’ll be— We should have seen it coming. We really should have. Perhaps some of us did, saw the darkening skies of disease, the scudding...
by Carolyn Waggoner | Nov 13, 2016 | Fiction, Humor, Politics |
Such an event had never befallen our village. We were so remote, so peaceable, so good. Of course, we had heard of plagues, but they seem to have been generally a cataclysm of the past, wrought largely upon distant and deserving populations. So, imagine our wonder...
by Carolyn Waggoner | Oct 10, 2016 | Fiction |
Hattie Mae Spenser stood in front of the kitchen sink, clutching the counter’s edge with one hand as she drained the jelly jar of cheap bourbon. It was two in the afternoon, but only straight alcohol could lessen the fiery pincers’ grip on her bowels. She knew her...
