“It had taken an earthquake for me to see Ceausescu greed as it really was, and I knew how bad these excesses would look to my countrymen.”
Johnny Payne’s Column
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Category: Fiction
Excerpt: “Red Hands”
Moving Clockwise around Easton County
“They’ve always been rivals with a town across the county line, a town of insulation and roofing makers. It’s a working-class rivalry, the authentic kind, one that lasts whatever color the collars become.”
Dawn in Pennsylvania
“How to describe it all? My dad and his sweaty armpits and the black garbage bags with the slice of old-time America buried inside. This sadness I’ve become filled with, which doesn’t feel like the kind of sadness the artist intended, but the opposite…his sadness looks like happiness to me.”
A Korean Dyad
“Saying that people need to know the objective truth about what goes on Up There, the objective truth about evil places fueled by imported wine and blank consciences.”
[Give the Man a Name]
“On fences and poles were the signs and posters of the age. Men with hard eyes and stiff lips; men with mustaches and military hats; women in dresses, sleeves rolled, forearms flexed. The age the man knew not.”