"Ash Monday"

"Ash Monday"
by T. Coraghessan Boyle

Rating: 8.0



Short story about two neighbors in a California canyon, a thirteen-year-old boy, Dill, who lives with his mother, and a Japanese man, Sanjuro, who lives with his wife. A thirteen-year-old boy, Dill, stand outside of his house, smelling gasoline.

She just stood there motionless, as the wind took the flames out of the bamboo and into the yard, rolling on across the hill away from her house and her garden and her tea things and the memory of her mother to set them down in a brilliant sparking burst that was exactly like a fireworks display, cleansing and pure and joyful, on the roof of the house below. ♦