The Carolina Quarterly

By Valerie Sayers

He must have been dying inside.

—Lefty Gomez

DiMaggio climbs into the back of the taxi and braces for the cab­bie’s double-take, but the little, red-faced driver doesn’t blink an eye, not even when Gomez asks for Griffith Stadium.

“How you fellas like this heat?”

You fellas. Is it possible he doesn’t know who they are?

“Tell you what’s really heating up, though. Those Nazis in White Russia, you hear about that?”

Gomez gives DiMaggio a look: what the hell’s a White Russia? And DiMaggio gives him a look back: Jesus God, does this guy really not know what’s on the schedule for today?

Continue reading The Heat

By Doris Betts

Carol Anne was almost 30 before she realized she possessed an odd talent.

From a distant room, hearing television, she had all her life been able to picture correctly every face long before she came in to check the screen, but she had assumed these familiar actors were merely remembered from other programs.

Or there might come the float of women’s voices over fitting room cubicles in the dress shop where Carol Anne worked but, again—though she knew in advance exactly how each emerging customer would look—she told herself that she must have noticed their faces earlier. Maybe she had a photographic memory with a narrow range.

Even using the telephone did not reveal more than that since either she spoke with friends whose features sprang into familiar mental view as they talked, or else she would be speaking to telemarketers she never expected to meet.

No boyfriends called her. She had sworn off them after the last heartbreak.

Continue reading Seeing is Believing

By Kevin Wilson

That night, his grandmother already asleep, Kevin smoked a cigarette on the porch and listened to the frantic sounds of wild dogs, snaps and growls and quick, sharp yelps of pain. He hated the dogs, mean and numerous, and the sounds they made were close enough to human that it made him shiver. Kevin was in his pajamas, barefoot, and though he wanted the noises to stop, he didn’t want to walk all the way to the edge of the road to break it up. He wished they’d get it over with, gang up on a weak one, and then walk on further down the road.

He had to be at school in four hours, but he made no move to return to his bed when he’d finished the cigarette. He had stolen a pack of menthol cigarettes from his grandmother a few weeks ago and he only had a few left. But he was restless, the dogs having stirred him further away from sleep, and so he began smoking another one. Now the sound of the dogs was closer, coming at him, and he stood up on the front step and waited for something to take shape against the darkness.

There was one dog at the front, on three legs, the left front leg hanging useless as the animal raced towards the house. The other dogs were close behind and when the first dog finally stopped running, just a few feet from the porch, Kevin watched the pack fan out, surrounding the animal. The barking was so loud now that he feared that even his grandmother would wake at the noise. He quickly stubbed out the cigarette, only half-smoked, and instantly felt foolish for having wasted it.

Continue reading A Disturbance