The relentless sun beat down on the old man in the stern. Ahead, his son pulled in the net, easy movements belying the backbreaking effort. The man looked at the few, undersized fish in the boat and wondered whether he had been right to teach his son everything he knew.
Ben lives in Dallas where he is viewed with tolerant amusement by his wife and two small boys. He occasionally writes screenplays, which are primarily treated with indifference, but he lives in hope.
It was only beach cricket. I bowled and he batted. The ball lingered an eternity in the patch of blue sky before plummeting towards earth. I was standing with outstretched arms when the full force of our relationship hit me in the mouth. “You’re no son of mine,” he said.
Stephen Goodlad started writing during the first lockdown in England having retired from work only a few months before, full of different ambitions. Writing has helped shape new ambitions and new challenges ahead.
At the cemetery, I look at my father in his dark suit and dark shoes and I see a drop of water on his cheek and I think it might be a tear. But then I think no, it’s only the rain. And then it rains and rains and rains.
Robert Hoekman Jr thinks you die when you stop wanting. He writes and writes and writes. He lives on a farm in Virginia and refuses to be put into a box. See more at rhjr.net.
No one cries but Grandma. She cries at the wake after, in the church basement next to the table with the sheet cake. I tell her hang in there, Grandma, because I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Then I go into the bathroom and stand inside the stall.
Robert Hoekman Jr thinks you die when you stop wanting. He writes and writes and writes. He lives on a farm in Virginia and refuses to be put into a box. See more at rhjr.net.
When someone can’t show up, my uncle asks me to be a pall bearer. I carry Grandpa to the ground with five men I don’t know. Grandpa who used to snatch my nose with his thick mechanic fingers. Grandpa whose skin is like rubber. I carry him to the ground.
Robert Hoekman Jr thinks you die when you stop wanting. He writes and writes and writes. He lives on a farm in Virginia and refuses to be put into a box. See more at rhjr.net.
We take a plane to Des Moines. My uncles and cousins and my aunt are there and everyone wears suits and black dresses in the town where Grandpa was born, where the sidewalks are gray and crumbling, where the names on the headstones sound like mine. Like his. Like ours.
Robert Hoekman Jr thinks you die when you stop wanting. He writes and writes and writes. He lives on a farm in Virginia and refuses to be put into a box. See more at rhjr.net.
Your grandpa died, says the note my dad left for me. It was yesterday, and tomorrow, we’ll go there, to Iowa. But when I see him after he comes from work, he is not worn and lost like a son. He is gray and cool and still. Like a couch.
Robert Hoekman Jr thinks you die when you stop wanting. He writes and writes and writes. He lives on a farm in Virginia and refuses to be put into a box. See more at rhjr.net.
The floor glistened with its fresh coat of lemon-scented mop water.
He entered by the kitchen, stumbling through the sliding glass door. Covered in mud and with grubby hands wrapped tightly around three grass stalks, he beamed.
And then her heart melted when he said, “Mommy, I picked you flowers!”
Jess works in fiscal, studies biology and English, and vanquishes Laundry Monsters on the weekends.
“Death comes for us all little one, and I’m so tired. I can’t keep running away anymore.”
His tiny fingers slid in between my own, tears dripping from his nose onto the back of his hand in rhythm with the heart monitor.
“Dad, can’t you keep running a little longer?”
Alex is a student at the University of Victoria. He divides his day into two parts: the hours when he has something to write about, and the hours where he has nothing left to say.
We rolled up our trousers and walked barefoot. Dad was cheerful, almost jolly. He laughed repeatedly between long, knee-gripping coughing fits. He was 59; I was 27.
It took me years to understand that it wasn’t a real laugh so much as a genuine imitation of a dying man’s chuckle.
Over the years Bob Thurber’s work has received a long list of awards and prizes. His most recent book is a collection of brief stories titled “Nothing But Trouble”. Visit BobThurber.net.