Longreads

BY MARICE RUTLEDGE From The Century Magazine "They had vowed to live only for one another. The theme of their love was sublime enough, but the instruments were fallible. Human beings can rarely…

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by Lynn FreedThey told Grace theyd found her curled into a nest of leaves, that since dawn theyd been following a strange spoor through the bush, and then, just as theyd begun to smell her,…

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by Jane DeluryThey came to Madagascarwomen, all educatorsto train a group of French teachers from around the island. They were housed in the living quarters of an abandoned coconut plantation…

It wasn't dreaming, because he wasn't in his bed and he wasn't asleep. He was in his chair, before the fire in winter, or before the screen door in summer, and it was always near midnight.

He was sleeping on the levee, during the flood of 1927, the way they had all curled in on themselves to keep warm there on the mud—even the grown men and women, if they were small and flexible. The big woman called Net couldn't sleep like that. She lay on her back, her stomach to the moon, and three children tethered to her by strong fingers in their hair or an arm over their bodies. Gustave watched them in the moonlight, like animal babies angling for food.

Grit was dead. There was no mistake about that. And on the very day of his burial temptation came to his widow. Grit's widow was "Great" Taylor, whose inadequate first name was Nell--a young, immaculate creature whose body was splendid even if her vision and spirit were small. She never had understood Grit.

On the last day of July 1969, David Todd arrived at the Hubert H. Humphrey VA Hospital just outside Minneapolis. His right leg had been amputated in Japan. His left leg was in…

They're free to run anywhere they like whenever they like, so they do. The land falls away from their small house on the hill along a prickly path; there's a dirt road, a pasture where the steer are kept, swamps, a gully, groves of fruit trees, and then the creek from whose far bank a wooded mountain surges--they climb it. At the top, they step out to catch their breaths in the light. The mountain gives way into fields as far as their eyes can see--alfalfa, soybean, corn, wheat. They aren't sure where their own land stops and someone else's begins, but it doesn't matter, they're told. It doesn't matter! Go where you please!