Fall of Every Year: A Hallowe’en Tale Russell came into the kitchen with his shuffling stomp, his heavy boots spilling crumbs of red clay from their deep tread. The linoleum-covered floor sagged beneath his bulk as he crossed to the table, beneath the dust-draped avocado-green ceiling fixture. The cone of 60-watt light it spilled onto the table was as feeble as his mother-in-law’s voice. Wont grits with yore aigs? she asked around a mouthful of blue smoke. He grunted in response to her bobcat voice and the cigarette dangling from her lips. Russell neither drank nor smoked, but he did allow himself a can of worm-dirt tobacco every couple of…

Straightenings The door was open but the light was already off in the office, and the blinds were drawn. The late August sun, powerful still in its old age, probed with dull yellow fingers at the slats and sides of the blinds. Eric sat with his shoulders forward and down, hands in his lap, his nose almost touching his desk. He looked to be at prayer, but his heart was fractured and inward-aimed. He had no words to offer to anyone or anything who had allowed this. Moments stretched out without Eric’s caring if they would ever add up to another hour, moments punctuated by occasional sounds from the hallway,…

Keeving Pogue disconnected the call and typed in a terse note for the service desk. He worked from his home every day, fielding customer service calls for the local satellite tv provider, a job that suited his personality and his physical condition. Keeving glanced at the clock on his computer screen and saw that it was almost dinnertime. He had never called it “lunch,” having been instructed by his late father that only damn Yankees and Californians called the noon meal “lunch,” and that good Arkansans like himself should use the proper word “dinner.” He hoped he wouldn’t get any more calls before time to eat. Keeving received one more…

I entered the store and left the city’s noise behind me on the other side of the glass. Born in the last century just six blocks away, I was a child of the concrete, but the shift in the air and in the streets over the decades had caused me to imagine often that I was going to sell the apartment and take Marcie to live in the country. We would shop at farmer’s markets and greet our neighbors by their first names and we would never hear sirens and we would sleep with nothing but screens between us and the trees and flowers outside. I longed to flee the…

The tent was cool inside, like a sawdust-floored church, and Cooper stepped in under the flap, his skin grateful for the swirling air, his eyes pleased with the lack of harsh light, his lungs receptive to the clean scent of wood fragments and hay and straw and leather and sun-warmed cloth. The grinding chaos of the carnival dropped away, muffled into near silence, even though it was pushed back by mere sheets of striped canvas and the sweet air within. Four children waited in line, their eyes on the carnival worker who was talking to them. A slender figure of sunburned leather, the carny gestured with his arms, describing circles…

Raised Voices The old man walked with care down the slope in the road, picking his way through the slicker ice patches and pushing his boots down with firm movements into the crystalline snow. He stopped at the mailbox and held onto it for a moment, steadying himself before stepping out onto the glassy road which he had to cross to reach the driveway. The dog didn’t tug on the leash, and he was grateful for her restraint, worried as he was that she would pull him down onto the unforgiving ice. He told the dog it was time to go, and they stepped together onto the road and walked…