Until her father died, Sissy Willard’s parents took her and her two brothers out of school every year at the end of April to spend a week in Kitty Hawk, and every year they stayed in the same old beachfront high-rise, the Ocean Vista.
And so they meet for drinks at the open court in the shopping plaza, something that happens quite often as they are wives with no jobs (depending on how you look at it) or wives with jobs (also depending on how you look at it)…
Congratulations to Elizabeth McCracken, whose story collection Thunderstruck has been longlisted for the National Book Award. Included in Thunderstruck is “Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey,” which appeared in our Spring 2014 issue.
Through the window Clara could see the men: dark still hats huddled together. The only thing moving was their pipe smoke. It curled in lamp-lit clouds. Then—a whoop!—the clouds blew, the huddle burst, the hats were flying.
Leon was a loser, but a tough loser trapped in a linebacker’s body. He wasn’t a vindictive person, or a hateful person, but there were long gaps in his disposition where you could tell a certain kind of dimness was setting in, the kind of...
She sounded good over the telephone. A soft rich alto voice, full grown. She was now twenty-two. Benton was fifty-one. A half-sister he had never had a conversation with in his life. Kate. Katie.
