When Francis Majewski escorts my sister to our back porch, he bows to her like a Polish nobleman, then hobbles home on walking crutches with hard leather cuffs that circle his forearms. Lesczyk Iwanowski, Gerald Bluebird, and I, Antek, stare at him, scratch our heads, call him “the Noble Pole.” He’s older than us. If...
Named Stefanie Karawinski, I’m seventeen years old. The woman in the title of the story, Sister Mary Leokadia, is perhaps fifty. Because the nuns at my grade school here in Superior wear black habits and white, scarf-like wimples covering their hair and ears, I can’t tell their ages. They belong to an order founded for...
My father has to go out in a storm. An eight-hour shift at the gasworks, then two or three hours tomorrow morning, All Soul’s Day morning, in a bar where “Happy Hour” starts at 7:30 A.M. and ends at noon, and he’ll walk home through the snow stinking of beer and CH4, the chemical composition...