God had warned the Reverend Billy Compton if he wanted to save his immortal soul he'd have to stop lusting after Labella Damsan. Billy had heard Him plain as day when he got down on his knees last night to ask for help in staving off this latest attack of the devil. "You've got to be strong," God said, "and shut that Jezebel, that unholy whore of Babylon, out of your mind." Lack of sleep had left dark smudges around Billy's eyes and his nerves teetered on the thin edge of a razor. He moved his head a little to the left to escape a piercing ray of sunshine that had found its way into the parsonage study. At least morning had finally come. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of both hands and leaned his head back on the hard rung of his oak swivel chair.

I've got nothing but contempt for that woman, he assured God, as he raked his fingers through his thick unruly black hair. Why she can't even hold a candle to Celeste. But he felt perspiration pop out on his forehead as he pictured Labella cutting her big round blue eyes at him from behind the Broadman Hymnal, and felt her body brush against him on her way to the choir loft. Last Sunday she'd even winked at him and whispered something he hadn't understood, but got the gist of anyway.

In June of 1923, Maria stepped onto a train and turned to see soldiers holding her husband back. The door was slammed shut, even as the train began to move, and she knew that it might be a long time before she saw Peter again. Perhaps never. They had no address now, something she always thought was part of people, like a name. She didn't know where the train was going but she did know that the invaders would arrive in Stit within the hour.

The freight car was packed and mothers held up crying children with aching arms to breathe the reeking air. After three hours the train stopped, the doors slid open and they stepped onto a plain. A village was burning in the distance and the fields had been stripped of crops and animals. Soldiers shouted to them that this was a stop to rest and stretch themselves and for the calls of nature - women to one side, men to the other. Most were discreet and went some distance; others acted where they stood. Conscripted laborers threw buckets of water into the cars and onto those who were soiled.

Then they reboarded and soon she could feel the train muscling up and around hills. After what seemed a long climb, it held itself back, brakes screeching, against a steep decline that threw them against one another. When it suddenly leveled out, she was pinned against a grime-blackened derelict, who's rancid breath exhaled into her face from a toothless cave. She shoved at him and some men pushed him off into a corner.

After a few more hours, the train stopped again. The doors were thrown open and there were policemen in strange uniforms. It was dark. A truck carrying a powerful searchlight rolled by the carriages and the policemen peered into each car while holding handkerchiefs to their faces. At last the people were taken out of the train and loaded onto trucks.

The caravan drove through the night and then she looked down from a mountain road as the first light opened a broad valley that had become a river of tents.

It's late in the afternoon of my second week of school as an eighth grader at Addison Junior High in Addison, Iowa, and I'm standing alone on the far side of the athletic field watching varsity football practice. The team wearing the blue shirts claps, breaks huddle and lines up in front of the team wearing the red shirts. That's Steve Nusser, number eleven in blue, bent over center, looking first to his left and then to his right and calling out the signals: "Set! Fifty-four! Thirty-six. . . ." He's the captain of the team, a junior, and sure to make all-state, either this year or next year. "Hup! Hup! Hup!" he barks out and drops back to pass, pumping his arm. A surprise. Instead of passing, he slides a lateral out to his fullback, sidesteps a red-shirter, and breaks out for a pass himself, angling across the hash marks towards me. The halfback throws the ball, Steve Nusser reaches out, tips it with his fingers, but the ball carries on beyond him and bounces right past me. I run after the football, pick it up, hug it to my chest and hurry back towards Steve Nusser.

"Hey, thanks, Jack," he says. He takes the football, rotates it until his fingers touch the laces, cocks his arm, and lets go, the ball describing an arc over to the other players. "See ya', Jack," Steve Nusser says to me.

I watch him run back. His calf muscles bulge and the pads under his jersey make his shoulders seem even broader than they are. "You bet, Steve," I say, but he is far enough away that I know he won't hear me. I add, "And my name's not Jack, it's Casey."

Professor Gene Lumpkin was always losing his nose. Ever since surgery for a cancerous growth he had a hard time keeping the plastic piece fitted securely in place. First it fell off when he was prowling the stacks of LeConte Library searching for a book. He had to go up and down the aisles, sometimes on hands and knees, looking for the fascimile. Then there was his jogging route. One evening he ran so hard he didn't realize the replacement was gone until he finished. He had to retrace his steps with a flashlight, fishing it out from under a mailbox while stepping in a pile of dog doo. Several times in the house - when he'd removed the prothesis that perched precariously between his eyes and felt uncomfortable - he'd forgotten where be put it, just as he regularly did with his glasses.

Only his two children and his wife Alice knew about the operation, and only she had ever seen the disfigurement. His colleagues in the History Department simply speculated about the illness and remarked how nervous he'd been when he came back to teach after a two weeks' absence. The rumor was that, despite his age, he had prostate problems and could be either impotent or incontinent.

In Rome, one pleasant spring evening in 1977, Theodore Beck conceived a fantasy of an ill-fated event. It had to do with himself and the circumstances of his life and the melancholy he had acquired. It was also one which was to give him a comfort when he was especially down. He had frequently felt that way in those days.

It had occurred several years after the divorce when he was forty-five years old - still lean, still boyish - and living in the apartments and what that had been. He had flown from Naples and come from the airport on the shuttle to the Stazione Termini almost at sunset. This had been his fourth trip to Rome, but then he had stopped visiting. He could only see the ruins now; he could only think of what it was.

He searched for his gate although he was quite early. He checked the luggage he had struggled with on and off the bus, the big molded suitcase and the rumpled vinyl garment bag that were showing the miles, then took a deep breath and looked for a place to rest - someplace that didn't bounce and make mechanical noises.

It had been a difficult week of business and he was frazzled; the textile-factory managers were stubborn and shrewd, but he planned to wind it up neatly with the engineer, Francesco, in Terni the next day. Later, he would drink more wine and there might even be a woman. (Francesco always knew a woman, typically some brooding but appealing enigma, who resided in an airy condominium with large, open windows and marble floors. The last one beat him at chess - if it happened again he would say he was distracted by her loveliness.)

He would travel by train across the darkened Italian countryside to Terni and then be back in Georgia in a few days. He would slow it down now, relax a little, maybe enjoy it after all. And while he milled with strangers in a foreign place, the fantasy evolved. It was a consequence of traveling in Europe in the seventies.

When I was a girl I had three parents, the usual set plus my maternal grandmother. Nanna lived in a little stone cottage across the creek that was made accessible to the house by a stout eighty-foot bridge. Of my three parents I'd have to say that Nanna had the most influence on me as a child.

My father was a dairy farmer with forty acres of land. Through one corner of the property ran the heavily treed ravine that separated my grandmother and the cows from the rest of us: the house, garden, orchard, and chickens. My father was always credited with building the place from scratch, and it's true that he cut the trees and milled the timber and quarried the gravel, cleared the pastures, planted the orchard, designed the buildings, built the bridges, even turned and glued every stick of furniture, but folks forget that my mother drove half the nails, split and hauled all that roofing up two stories, glazed the windows, worked the handsaw from dawn until dusk for two years. It was a partnership, that creation, with my mother's work no less visible, just not credited.

Her name was Erika, a plump, passive woman. She hadn't always been so, but that is what she became. In the old photograph album that I pored over tirelessly with Nanna on cold, winter evenings, evenings in which I heard the family saga serialized, told and retold and embroidered upon, I saw that my mother had been a tall reed of a girl who's hips had spread and who's waist had thickened with each year past puberty. It was a family joke that my father had chosen her for her strength rather than beauty, and, given what they did together in their early years, I've always believed it. The passivity came later, and was simply her response to what life threw at her, a defense mechanism, but also a kind of wisdom. My grandmother couldn't have been more different.

There was another incident with my Uncle Donald. As before, it involved his trying to come for Sunday supper, and my Mother keeping him from coming inside, and his waiting for some time before getting back in his car and driving back to Columbus again. These times are painful, but they are a test of us. Lo are the tested the true vine, it is written; only the tempest of wickedness sures the binding of its troth.

We live in the village of Gilead, here in the most removed and earliest settled places of the Mohican Valley. The great main river of the same name flows through here, and each of its five branches flow through each of the five adjoining towns. All the rivers' names came from the Indian tribes, who we learned from Pastor Chapin were the very sons of the original Tribes of Cain. Their languages were beautiful, he said, but their savagery caused them to turn aside the olive branch of our forefathers, the Northwest Territory settlers, and lose forever the chance of redemption these good and gentle men had by their providence opened to them.

We ourselves are Nazarenes. We believe the Scriptures are the actual and unmediated Word of God. We believe it is the Truth of his mouth as He has chosen to constitute and deliver it through the earthly vessels of His Prophets. We believe he has lifted all veils, and where he has not has fitted the figures of nature to make his Revelations plain.

Fisher made the discovery at the landfill while working the hydraulic lever on the dump truck. The letter - at first glance just another scrap of garbage - came fluttering through the charred air like a butterfly and landed softly at his feet. The yellow stationery drew his eyes, like a magnet, to a woman's handwriting. He released the hydraulic lever for a moment to pinch the delicate letter in his gloved hand and then, after emptying the heap of garbage into the pit, slipped into the cab of the dump truck to peruse his discovery.

He was immediately taken by the cute, effervescent letters that bubbled up from the page - a woman's touch, with long T's and flowing L's that had blossomed from the tip of a black fountain pen. The return address on the matching envelope confirmed the location of the house - one of the prettiest and best kept on his route - and he realized that he had seen her many times working in the flower garden when he drove by to collect her trash.

She was a tall woman with dark flowing hair and a good tan, and he deemed it an honor to serve her. She was neat, and punctual, and always positioned her trash cans in a neat line along the curb so that he could empty them with minimal effort. Fisher knew a good woman when he saw one, and he could tell that she was conscientious by the way she lined her containers with heavy duty plastic.

I started throwing up on the school bus that morning, so Mr. Ring turned the bus around and dropped me off back at the house. By afternoon, I had a fever.

"William," Mom called downstairs that evening, "it's 103!" She held the thermometer in the light. Everything I heard had a high pitch and an echo.

"Well, let's take him on in," he said, appearing at the top of the stairs. He leaned over me and, for the first time, his eyes did not glare with meanness.

Mom was looking at him, her face tight with fear. He wrapped me in a blanket, picked me up, and carried me down the stairs in his arms. At first, I was frightened by the way he carried me like a child. The only other time I saw him carrying something this way was when he hit a fawn and carried it off the road and put it into his trunk.

Throughout dinner, Margaret had listened to Miles discuss the upcoming drive to France. Barcelona's Gaudi buildings looked like 'a Disneyland on acid,' as Miles called it. He had wanted to spend more time in Spain, but he'd been overruled. None of four had ever been to southern France, the Midi. Always the good sport, Miles agreed to move on. "Let's finalize our plans," he said. "First, how about Carcassonne? If we want to, we can drive all the way from Avignon to Monaco."

How sure of himself Miles sounded, Margaret thought. After only two days, he had picked up color, his nose and his checks a peachy tan. Margaret wanted to kiss that face, and run her fingers through his curly blonde hair, things only Rose could do, whenever she wanted to.

The restaurant was on a side street off the Ramblas. Their table straddled the sidewalk, partly inside and partly outside, near two open glass doors. Halfway through the meal, shouting protestors from an anti government demonstration ran down the block. Everyone stopped eating when shots rang out.

The tall sleeper rolls over in bed pulling the warm blanket tighter. The risen sun shows around the rulerstraight edges of the room-blackening shades. Light shines through tiny starlike holes here and there in the shades.

Suck me dry kiddies. Just suck me dry as a big bone or big stone. Well, I mean it's time to get up for work. That time comes five days a week, you know. On the clock.

Kick the wall with heavy steeltoes.

Jack and Jill stand close together in the middle of the wide flat grassy field. Jack's in green and holds a shiny bare metal pail in his hand and Jill's in red and holds an unpainted wooden bucket with rusted iron straps around it. The blue sky hangs above peppered with fluffy clouds, one black, from which a voice falls onto them.

Brainum the dark forest-Angel calls. Listen! Listen!

Oh shut up, they cry in unison into the middle of the voice in the black cloud. As though insulted, it dissolves and dissipates into the scattered fluffy white clouds.

I am sorry about the milk.

I am sorry about the stale bread, and the moldy cheese, and the rotten eggs.

But mostly I am sorry about the milk.

I'm also sorry about the plants. I think I overwatered them, or underwatered them. Especially the bonsai. I gave it a nice bath in the kitchen sink, let it soak overnight, just like you said. I don't know what happened.

And it goes without saying that I'm sorry about the fish. Every last one of them.