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Short Stories and more
Perfect for driving, workout, or relaxed listening.
| Facing Grace With Gloria William H. Coles A scam artist does good. Finalist in the 2007 William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition. |
Facing Grace with Gloria
"You got any cash?" I asked. "Nothing." "I want to visit my mother." "She write to you?" "Not yet. But she needs me. Came to me when I was inside." Listen (21:09) download pdf
Reddog
Eventually my sister quit coming; she had a lot on her mind with her van full of kids–and no husband. So I go a year with no visitors and when I get dragged to administration to face an assistant to the warden, I was half-crazy. Listen (38:21) download pdf
Captain Withers’s Wife
The policeman backed away. “We got a call . . .” “I called,” Amy yelled. “I want the commander.” Listen (30:49) download pdf
The Stonecutter
I was thirteen, never in love, and yearning to leave home when a red, two-seated convertible drove up to our gate. The driver’s door opened and a girl of twenty-two with a perfectly shaped light-skinned body emerged in a see-through dress that showed almost everything and I imagined the rest. My father, a tall imposing figure of a black man with bulging muscles from carving statues and grave markers for the dearly departed, tried not to look. Listen (21:04) download pdf
Crossing Over
I go to sit for a moment at the nurses’ station, put my arms on the counter. I got scars on my right arm, and I set to thinking, as I often do when I feel like this. Listen (6:11) download pdf
On the Road to Yazoo City
Listen (13:26) download pdf
Suchin's Escape
Listen (36:54) download pdf
The Gift
Listen (31:37) download pdf
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| Reddog William H. Coles A convict fails to charm his last chance at love. Winner 2006 Sandhills Writers Competition. |
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| Captain Withers’s Wife William H. Coles A desperate wife demands justice. Finalist in the William Faulkner: William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. |
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| Crossing Over William H. Coles A nursing assistant takes a wrong turn in patient care. Presented at Kenyon College and at Zoetrope Belize Workshop. |
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| The Stonecutter William H. Coles Stonecutter's son falls hopelessly in love with a client. |
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| On the Road to Yazoo City William H. Coles Discovering love in Mississippi when there's nothing left at the bottom of the bucket. |
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| Suchin's Escape William H. Coles A victim of the slave trade escapes. |
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| The Gift William H. Coles A determined mother protects her deformed child from the destructive sympathies of family and society. |
I was sleeping in this mission after being discharged from the psych ward at DC General and some hophead stole my cash from my veteran’s disability checks that had piled up while I was so rudely and unjustly incarcerated. So I dropped by my best buddy Arthur who lived in two, side-tilted Dumpsters at the edge of inner Washington, DC.
On Christmas Day my second year in prison for murder, my mother stopped coming to visit. She doesn’t call and I can’t get in touch with her. In August, she missed my twenty-fifth birthday. A couple months later my sister came and said, "Mother doesn’t want to think about it anymore. Try to understand." I did try.
In 1963, on an American base in France, Amy Withers loaded her husband’s hair-trigger automatic pistol, called the military police, wrapped her newborn baby in a hand-knitted beige afghan with a purple border, and waited at the front window of her common place bungalow. The policeman arrived, parked his car near the curb, and walked toward the house. She opened the front window from above and shot four rounds into the air.
My name is Agnes Swaggert and I work in this nursing home for next to nothing. I do good things for old folks like Mr. Wiggins who has been with us for two months. He lost his hair to radiation, his eyesight to Cadillacs, and his voice to a trach. He moans non-stop, drools and spits, shits five times a day so the sheets got to be changed. I don’t think he ever sleeps.
My life at twenty-one was never in tune–like a D-string on an antique Gibson with a peg that wouldn’t hold–and I’m walking up this two lane side road about ten miles West of Canton and North of Jackson where I have just come from. Haven’t seen a car in maybe an hour, the straps of my pack digging into my shoulders, the sun burning my eyes because I lost my shades leaning over a riverbank to fill my water jug, and dragging the guitar case cause it’s just too heavy to lift off the ground. Pure shit. But I got to make it work. I’m flat broke.
Antoine lit a cigarette with the lighter from the dash of the twenty-seven year-old 1976 Lincoln Continental and leaned forward with both forearms on the steering wheel. Harry beat out a rhythm on the dash with both hands—BOOM chee CHEE—di di BOOM; and he sang a song of lost love. Antoine liked the tune, liked the way his cousin could make it flow.
In 1959, a week after her seventeenth birthday, Catherine missed her period in February, and then in March. By late April she was not sleeping well and most of her waking hours were spoiled by nausea and hating everything she ate. Her mother Agnes made an emergency appointment with Dr. Crowder.
September 21st, 2011 at 9:05 pm
I'm from a Big Town outside of Yazoo City, The capitol of Mississippi: Jackson, MS. I have been through Yazoo many times.