Book in progress
Prep Boy
A coming-of-age story that begins after the age when a person is supposed to have come of age. About compulsion, memory, friendship, and accepting that getting better cannot make the past return.
A Mother’s Touch
Everybody tells the cashier something.
Three encounters. A handful of confessions. One question that follows a man all the way to the bus stop.
By noon, he had already heard about a divorce, a daughter who no longer called, and a dog that had died with its head in a woman’s lap. None of them knew him. That seemed to help.
They came through his line with milk, cigarettes, frozen dinners, and the sort of truths people saved for strangers. He listened because it cost him nothing. Or because he thought it cost him nothing.
Outside, the buses sighed against the curb. A child pressed close to the glass while his mother searched through her bag, and for one second the whole day seemed to narrow into a single unfinished question.
Full story coming here.