By JUNE GERVAIS
We see the first one in Bellport, eight o’clock at night, and we don’t know what it is. We’re driving along a two-lane highway on the south shore when we come upon it: a caravan of cars idling in the shoulder, taillights scarlet in the dark. “Should I be driving in that lane?” my husband says. Seeing no construction signs, we drive on. We pass a mile of cars. Then we see the gas station at the head of the line. It’s been three days since Sandy hit.
By ROLF YNGVE
I told Christopher, the wall passed through here. We stood on the sidewalk and looked down at a plaque set into chic, new cobblestones.
Berliner Mauer 1961–1989.
I live a few blocks from a cruise ship terminal. When ships dock there, they tower above the nearby buildings, which top out at four or five stories high. At night, their decks and windows glitter in neat rows, like high-rise apartment buildings, as if downtown Manhattan has suddenly been pulled close. When the ships finally depart, their horns boom dramatically, out of place in my quiet, unassuming neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn.
EXODOS. I deciphered the Greek letters, extrapolating from the Cyrillic alphabet learned in college Russian. Exodus! A hairy Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments popped into my mind. A domestic Moses, my husband spurred our lagging, quarreling kids on to baggage claim and immigration.
This is the first part of a two-part Dispatch. Pt. 2 will be published online in November.
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She slept for the first two hours of the trip, and when she woke up, the first thing she said was, “When we get back I want a divorce.” We were headed north with the hopes of going to Canada for no other reason than to say that we’d left the country. We’d decided on Thunder Bay, Ontario, because it was the closest destination across the border from our home in southern Illinois. And now, it seemed, the trip was doomed before we’d covered half the length of our own state.
By KRISTA LEAHY
Cold beer, slippery hands, cigarettes no one (everyone) wanted,
Who was it that cried out? This cry,
a call that opens night
breaks out like a bird
breaking to greet dawn, or
the arrival of a high tide
that brings schools of fish
whose scales make the waters
glint and shimmer, glint and shimmer.
By KELWYN SOLE
I want what comes after:
the first lifted bucket’s clang
once the rooster’s all crowed out,
a keen thirst for fresh water
as sequel to that sound
Writing in Place is a column in which authors published in our print and web pages tell us about their writing spaces.
I write in a glass-sided room, an addition to a 1950s brick bungalow, southern style. From the threshold that once led to the outdoors, it’s just one giant stride to my desk: space enough to tap at a keyboard, or lie down; for books and papers to breed, but not for dancing (a tiny tango when someone says yes).
The guard at the gate smiles a toothless smile, and lightly taps the security boom open for me. We recognize each other; him with his brown uniform and heavy automatic tucked into a pocket on the front of his bullet-proof jacket, me with my rusted car and naive wave.
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