Suprise Me

The drab, cavernous room reeked of sweat and hormones. Then the DJ mounted the steps to the stage. Read More

Grace's bugle will shatter the silent spring with piercing streams of silver. Four notes will hold up the sky while they echo through the cemetery, layered like too many tears on a little girl’s cheek. Read More

The radio alarm woke me the morning of June 6, 1968. I listened to the news, silently wept and pulled the covers over my head. I couldn’t get out of bed. After some time, my mother came in to see why I wasn’t up yet. “They got Bobby”, was all I could get out between… Read More

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. Read More

A snaky escape from forbidden sites in old Taipei. Read More

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. Read More

The problem is not the assembly. It’s the document purporting to be assembly instructions that makes the process maddening. Originally written in an obscure language, it’s been clumsily translated into English, rendering it completely opaque. The consumer vents her frustration by throwing the directions away and pursuing an intuitive approach, based on a no-doubt misleading… Read More

“What are you going to do?” they asked. “You’re an academic!" Read More

For many years until I retired I worked as the librarian at Jane Addams,   a small,  inner-city vocational high school in the infamous south Bronx.   True,  the neighborhood was sketchy,   and the local bank where many of us cashed our monthly paychecks was robbed a couple of times,  but our school was… Read More

Every time I have seen the phrase “teenager in love” – starting with the first time this prompt appeared in Retrospect two years ago – I have read it as teen-A-ger, with the accent on the second syllable, rather than TEEN-ager, the usual pronunciation, with the accent on the first syllable. In contrast, if the… Read More