It was the summer of 1983 and eight-year-old Danny Brown was having a terrible time. A shy and serious only child, he had recently been forced to move with his parents and, as far as he was concerned ... [+]
Martha Witt, author of the novel "Broken as Things Are" (Picador 2005), has published stories in One Story, AGNI, Narrative Magazine, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her six translations include works by Nobel Prize laureates, Grazia Deledda and Luigi Pirandello. A Fulbright Scholar, Martha directs the Performing and Literary Arts Honors Track at William Paterson University. "Ghost Writers" is in Short Circuit #12, Short Édition's quarterly review.
There's a relief that comes with revealing things down to their minutiae; small gasps of relief make space in the bedroom for the proverbial elephant. I do have a good husband. He's the kind that does not speak immediately after being asked a question. This is a quality worthy of admiration, the bone-deep kind of admiration. Even the review of his book in Vanity Fair a few months back mentions his "patient manner"—close enough to what I mean. I was surprised to find that the article about my husband had been written by a man. I have always associated certain ways of noticing with the feminine
