Mount Carmel Road was a quiet dead-end in the north of town. In the middle of the night when the war in the Far East was over and the radios blared the news, all lights went on in all the houses on that blind street, except where the card game was played. Many of the neighbors were solidly indignant about that turn of events on VJ Night, two Mount Carmel boys would not be coming back from the mad Pacific, which most of us only saw in Saturday newsreels at the theater.
This house was a dark house on a dark street in my town that, with some lesions and scars, hangs on to a place in my memory and will not let go. Tenants and landlords hardly leave scribed notations of a dwelling, thinking all things will ferment, dissipate, and eventually pass on. Fifty years or more of recall usually get dulled, terribly pockmarked, or fade into the twilight the way one ages, dimming of the eyes, bending of the knees, slow turns at mortality. But this one rides endlessly in place, a benchmark, a mooring place. It resides as a point of time, a small moment of history colored up by characterization of one incident.
literally stories 