Category Archive Browsing Category: Sunday Photo Fiction

The black bag over his head was bad enough, his breath moist and uncomfortably hot. Funny how he’d never noticed before just how hot the air in your lungs really was. You saw it on a winter morning, of course, the jets of steam coming from the children as they waited for the school bus. But you…

It was a different city than the one I left in September,  when the desperate final heat blanketed the roofs and buildings and filled the town with odors of diesel fuel and rotting trash. This was a crisp city, the wind cold on my cheek and wafting scents of wood smoke, coffee, baking bread.The trees along the streets and in the parks had reached…

“You brung her the ice tea like she ask?” “Yes’m.” “Then go on out there and sit. You know she likes to talk about the cars goin’ by.” “Do I have to?” We went through this every Sunday. Gemmie would make Aunt Ethel an ice tea and tell me to go sit with the old lady on…

” “I thought you guys wasn’t supposed to pick up no hitchhikers.” Now that they were in the diner, he looked older than he had in the parking lot. “No, them days is past. Rigs now, well you just gotta see it. It’s like an apartment. Got a microwave, satellite TV. Even a bed.” He…

  I could tell from the look on his face that he couldn’t fix it. He held it between his blackened fingers, turning it this way and that. “This,” he said, “is junk. Not worth repairing.” I swallowed. “But my father gave this to me. He said it had been his father’s. It’s an heirloom.” “Nonsense,”…

Ellery tugged my sleeve as we walked through the park on that last golden day of autumn. “Daddy, why is that man all alone?” He was five then, full of questions. If I didn’t answer quickly I knew he would race over and ask the  man himself. That was Ellery in a nutshell. Impulsive to…

I admit I was a little drunk when it happened, so I am not perhaps the most reliable witness. There was a girl on the cruise, much too young for me, not that this fact lessened my interest. I had managed to convince her to come ashore with me to a small café I knew…

The old woman held up a hand demanding  silence, her gauzy sleeve almost trailing into the candle. I had a hard time not laughing, but Cherie was  wearing what I recognized as her “church face,” somber and pious and overtly attentive. If she was allowed to talk she would likely have used big unfamiliar words and slathered…

The photograph does not tell the story. The faces, improbably fresh, betray little but youth. The uniforms are new, the flying boots unbuckled over battledress trousers. One fellow wears a jaunty scarf tied around his neck in the manner of Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks as he leans against the ops shack in an attitude of…

Suffolk had set his trap. Now it was time to spring it. “Lord Cardinal, your recent actions have done what you wished them to do. You have attracted His Majesty’s attention. Only,” and here he smiled, “it may not be the sort you had imagined.” Wolsey, stiff and impenetrable, buried in his velvet, sat with a face of…