Black Ice
by N. West Moss
Franny Bigalski did not want her god-damned wind chimes thrown out when she died. She sat at the dining room table, looking through her address book for Irene Anderson’s new cell number. Ir...
Once Removed
“I’d help you look,” Elise’s mother says from her spot on the recliner, peering over her reading glasses and her copy of The Bourne Supremacy. “But I just had my nails done. At your favorite place. House of F...
Old Dogs
It was well past midnight when a ring awakened Krebs’ from a dreamless sleep. The old surgeon groped in the dark for the phone. His hand found the receiver, and he pressed its cold plastic to his ear.
“Dr....
Second Time Around
In late January, 1967, three months after my back had been broken in a car accident, the radiologist and orthopedic surgeon decided I could move gradually from being prone to upright and walking. First I had t...
Souvenir
October 2000
"Good morning, Mrs., uh, Ms. Falloughs?"
"Please, call me Ellie." Eleanor Falloughs extended her arm across the desk.
"Thank you; I will." The man offered his own hand, which was warm and s...
The Crimson Mask
It was July. San Marco was filled with tourists feeding seeds to pigeons. I drank a bellini at Cipriani. How ordinary the place looked, like the out of date Italian restaurants in Jersey suburbs. I bought a...
Pajamas and Bathrobes (a novel excerpt)
Francis was sitting in the back seat of her father’s car, staring herself in the eye in the rearview mirror. She rested her left hand on the bag that lay next to her, filled with clothes and books, and put ...
Confession
“I’m worried.”
“What are you worried about?” I asked.
Mr. Jones was a sixty-five year old veteran teetering between living and dying, more dying than living. I knew it, and he knew it. A cancer had eaten ...
Surprise at Sunset
Lift off
beyond sixty,
and here my heart
as flutter-fed as
any girl’s.
The patchwork years
blew by. Still, I
in some odd state
I dodge as not senescence
have faith that few will note
and fewer ca...
Light
I saw an old friend at the supermarket,
a friend of my firmer flesh and lighter heart days
I heard that she’d been ill –
that big, mutilating women’s disease
We exchanged the discreet inquires of suburban m...