Short Stories by Sallie Bingham

“She’s tiny,” my father told me when he was preparing me to meet the queen. “Don’t move suddenly, don’t try to shake her hand. Curtsey – that’s appropriate, even for an American.”

When Dad was courting Fat Annie, she gave us a chandelier, not a cheap wire contraption but hand-forged welded iron.

You don’t see many Anglos at the Indian dances these days, maybe because we’ve shamed ourselves out of attending, or they have.

Claire first saw the brown, barren-shaped shabby old female bear when the builder were laying out the dimensions of her new house.

On Thursday Miss Nancy told Luke they were going to spend the weekend in the country.

I am my master’s horse but he does not make me lie down in green pastures.

We don’t see fathers often and when one arrived, with his newspaper, I felt as though our circle was complete.

They stood under the porch light and she held out her hands. He took them and slipped his fingers inside her gloves. Her palms were soft and lined.

Once when I was seven, I saw my mother on her hands and knees in a bed of snowdrops. Not beside it. In it.

They were old, they had entered those years when nothing ever happens except falls, illness, approaching disability, and neither of them had planned on that when they married, when the children were born, and then the grandchildren.