I Believe

The shouts pass over the water to Lincoln. He sits there, silent. The man who, more than any other, overstepped his authority in a time of war. Habeas corpus suspended. A nation half at arms. And the question underneath all of it, whether any nation so conceived and dedicated could long endure. He broke the limit. But he never pretended he was above it. He answered to the Congress, to the ballot,...

The mess. Mid rats. He came in a couple minutes early. He ate fast, at a table that became a hospital bed for the wounded, and then he cleared his tray and dishes and moved into the narrow passage with the pipes running low overhead, ducking his head around them. Up the metal stairs to starboard. A couple of minutes with the sea before the watch. The deck was nearly empty. In a few minutes the oth...

Behold again the stars. The light. The stairs down. Down. There are no windows in the basement of the residence hall. The light comes from tubes that hum in the ceiling. It does not change, the same at five in the morning as at noon. He could work an entire spring semester down here and never once know what the sky was doing. He lets himself in with the key on the loop at his belt. The door shuts...

A man selling good cows is not happy about it. Wednesday morning in May. He pulls into the gravel lot at half past seven. The sun is up but the cold has not gone. Winter is fighting summer. Some days in May might reach the 80s, some days snow. His breath hangs in the air and catches on the bill of his hat. Jesse stands on the seat and watches the door. The lot is full. It should not be full. Wedne...

Dr. Nick van Terheyden had bone pain that he could not explain. He was fifty-eight, a physician in Maryland. A specialist ordered a $350 blood test for vitamin D deficiency. The test came back positive. The deficiency was severe enough that if left untreated, it would lead to osteoporosis. Van Terheyden’s insurer was Cigna. They refused to pay for the test. The corporate medical director who signe...

The trailer’s loaded by four. Twenty-five head, sorted yesterday, the gate latched twice. The F-350 idles in the yard while he checks the running lights one more time. Jesse watches from the cab, ears up. The Bentley mark on her forehead catches the radio light. She is certain about the day. Buffalo to Torrington is four hours if the roads are dry. He pulls out of the drive at 4:17 and turns south...

The Open Door. October, 1723. Market Street Wharf in Philadelphia. A seventeen-year-old runaway stepped off a boat. Dirty from the journey, pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings. He carried his entire fortune on him, a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in copper. Food money for a few days and nothing else. He could not afford a room. The shilling went to the boatmen for passage down the Delawa...

Gravel lot. Friday morning in Torrington. The trailers are lined up in neat rows at the front, goosenecks and bumper-pulls together, dust still settling from the last one in. He pulls in at the end of the row and steps down from the cab. October cold. His breath hangs in the air and catches the low sun. He only comes on Fridays. The bakery is only open Thursday through Saturday, and there’s no sal...

The apartment is cold. Outside, sirens. Somewhere down the block, gunshots. This is Hunting Park, North Philadelphia . The sounds of Hunting Park don’t stop because a mother is trying to feed her children. At the kitchen table, two kids are eating. Whatever was in the cupboard, she put it on their plates. Her son is going blind and needs a doctor. Her daughter is small and hungry. She knows. She s...

They came for him in the night as men come for the things they fear. The house was small and made of stone and set against a hillside in a country not his own. He knew they would come. He had seen it in a dream. A woman. She had held his head in her arms and painted his face as though preparing him for the earth. He woke to the smell of smoke. The fire climbed the walls and found the timber roof a...

The shingles were hot enough to burn through his knees if he stopped moving. July in Leavenworth and the sun hit the roof and the heat came off in waves you could see rising like water that wasn’t there. He was skinny. Wiry. The kind of thin that doesn’t come from a gym. It comes from being on a roof in Kansas every day for years until the work carves you down to what’s essential and everything el...

You’re gassing up at a Flying J just west of Rawlins, Wyoming, and the wind is having its way with you. The gusts come off the high plains at sixty miles an hour, shoving your truck door open, ripping it from your hand. Down the interstate you passed two semis on their sides, lying in the median like dead animals. Strange lattice fences line the highway; if you’re not from here you don’t know they...

Act I. The Mountain Danny Kowalski’s alarm went off at four-fifteen. He dressed in the dark so he wouldn’t wake the baby. Jeans, thermal, boots. His wife, Sarah, still asleep on her side. One arm over her belly, where the second one was growing. He pulled the door shut. Stood in the cold on the landing of their apartment in Chambersburg and waited for the truck. Rick pulled up at four-thirty with...

The day before we started bombing, Iran agreed to stop stockpiling nuclear material. The day before. We bombed them anyway. This is a piece about what strength actually means. And what we do now. Act I. The Playground The morning sun, warm on the blacktop. The yard smelled like cut grass and rubber. Beyond the kickball diamond, a basketball hoop with a chain net and monkey bars where the younger k...

Once upon a time, I might have been a Democrat. The theory sounds good. Love your neighbor. Build systems that catch people when they fall. Use the government to do what charity alone can’t. I’ve read the arguments. Listened to the sermons. But the more I pull on the logic threads, the more it comes apart. Not because the compassion is wrong. The compassion is right. After all, rend our hearts, no...

Western Iraq. The Euphrates River Valley. Flat country. Date palms and canals and dust so fine it gets into the action of a rifle and into the boots and lungs of the men and women who carry them. The enemy buried bombs in the roads. Watched from rooftops. Wore no uniform. Walked among the living like the living until the moment he was not. A man drove a fuel truck and skimmed money from the sale a...

An eternity ago on a Sunday night. But it was never about Sunday night. Unseasonably warm in Dallas. Blue sky, few clouds. February but it doesn’t feel like it. Feels like a gift after the recent ice. The kind of morning where you leave the door propped open and let the air in. It’s gonna be a big day. The biggest day, actually, if you’re in the business of cold beer and television sets. Champions...

Blue sky, golden grass, tall sagebrush, mountains capped white behind. Chores done. Coffee in the sun room. He looks out across the south pasture. The tips of the tall sage quiver. The wind picks up the flags along the fence line, tugging at the screw lock chain links that hold them to the wire. The Stars and Stripes is up all the time, frayed at the edge. And the other. It’s been up since the ele...

The Founders knew about the Leviathan . They had read their Bibles. Job. Isaiah. Ezekiel. The beast that cannot be bargained with. Cannot be tamed. Cannot be killed. They had lived under a king. They knew what unchecked power looked like when it wore a crown. They did not fear a British king. They had beaten him already. They feared an American one. So they built a cage . Three branches. Separate...

Kansas. Summer, 1936. The bluffs above the Missouri. The river didn’t look dangerous. Wide and brown and slow. Trees leaning over the banks. A boy could stand on the bluff and think he understood what he was looking at. He was fourteen. Watching a man jump from the railroad bridge. Everyone did it. You climbed the trestle. Leapt. Hit the water. Swam to the bank. He’d done it himself, twice. The sh...

There is the Leviathan. He moves in the deep,in the playground of God. He waits for his foodin its season. God asks,Can you draw him out with a fishhook? Put a cord through his nose? Make a covenant with him? Once, he was not vast. Once, he was small. He swam among other creatures. He learned hunger. He learned taking. No one remembers when he grew too large. No one remembers the first timeno one...

There is the Leviathan. He moves in the deep,in the playground of God. He waits for his foodin its season. God asks,Can you draw him out with a fishhook? Put a cord through his nose? Make a covenant with him? The Zippo. He ran his thumb across the worn edges. Took it out of his pocket. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Act I. The Affair Copenhagen, spring 1945, three weeks after the Germans left. Y...

The banana cost forty-seven cents. I got it from the vending machine at work. I grab it on my way out to the parking lot. Fifteen minutes of freedom. The break room smells like microwaved fish. I just need to be outside for a minute. I lean against the wall by the loading dock. Trucks roll past on the 15. The sun’s already down, but the sky is still that burnt orange it gets out here. The smog hol...

Act I. Tick Tock [ SFX: The noise of New York City ] [ Narrator ] New York City in December. Manhattan. No snow yet, but the cold sits like it’s waiting for something. A kid walks home from work. Twenty-four years old. Jacket zipped to the throat. Same route he always takes. Down from Midtown, cutting through the side streets. Too many tourists on the main streets. He wants to move through the wor...

[SFX: Solo Guitar playing Auld Lang Syne ] Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot, and the days of long ago? We’ve forgotten the meaning of the song playing in the background when we toast on New Year’s Eve. Let’s remember. Back to Ulysses S. Grant. He couldn’t hear music. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t . And the most important moment of his life wo...