Evelyn Battersby was a difficult woman to please, an easy one to disappoint. When her children brought their gifts on silver salvers she would sniff, wrinkle her nose, send them back to the kitchen.

Henry leafed through the applications on his desk, sighed, picking up the first one.
Application no. 56/438/b
Activity/Description: Cheese rolling.  A large rinded cheese placed at the top of a hill. . .

Into the Hills

. . . Every day he would wake up and rearrange his sense of self, renew his memories of the world before, and head back into routine in order to make the next paycheck. . .

      Childhood’s Cave The worst times were Thursdays. They were the weekly meetings, when things were assigned, calculated, declared. A reprimand or an insult always brought her father home in the worst of moods. Her mother, on edge, the frozen mask of...

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      Quince There is a quince tree in the Alice Munro short story The Moons of Jupiter, and also in the poem “Lunch With Pancho Villa” by Paul Muldoon. In the novel The Love of Singular Men, by the Brazilian author Victor Heringer, a mother beats her...

      Breaking Bread with Strangers When the stranger came to my house, he brought bread. “Here,” he said, “You take it.” And then he sat down at the dinner table, waiting to be served. I placed the bread on a board. My wife brought in the brisket and...