Charlotte Matthews

There they are beside the tracks. But let’s begin earlier, let’s have it be this morning. They’ve just crossed over the Susquehanna on a trestle bridge: the clack clack of wheels waking the tigress in her berth, the elephant braces himself, spl [...]

My mother is six and does not know what I have just read in the paper. Kneeling in the backyard dirt, she makes a fort for her doll Clara. Her father’s away on business so much lately she’s taken to spending early evenings here, digging a world [...]

It won’t be long before the designs you form are echoed in the shivering leaves of an ash tree right there on the hillside and because it’s November those patterns will remain all winter long, a sort of engraved, emblazoned pattern. You are wa [...]

Today, in the fields, the season’s last cutting: square bales. My German neighbor and his son stand for a moment in the stillness seeing the barn loft where they’re going to stack the hay in layers so exact, one across another, horizontal the [...]