Merrill Gilfillan’s book of selected and new stories, recently out, is delicious:
“Summer evenings when the light softens and the air sets, you will see boys materialize from various points of the little village and walk heavily to the playground of the knoll-top school. Two, three, four of an evening, they straggle in and take, each, privately, to one of the playground swings with a discreet distance between them and slowly begin to swing. They are lovesick Arapaho boys, sixteen and eighteen years old, and their swinging as the night falls is pensive and stop-gap. Their long black hair flows and buckles with their arcs. They gaze off at the tail end of sunflare behind the Wind River mountains or at the dusty river course, August-salty, to the east, below. They will swing in rhythmic silence through the sunset and well into the dark before they wander off in various directions and finally home.”