Read from the first story, "Taking a Stitch in a Dead Man’s Arm", of Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories by Katherine Vaz:

I changed the bandage over my father’s knee in the final month of his life. His wound was violet, and blood pulsed through. I never looked away from it. I swallowed my vomit when it struck the back of my clenched teeth; I was ready to swallow my insides as often as necessary—it was important to gaze at his flesh exactly as it was because I would not have it with me for much longer. I wanted to learn matter-of-factness about being this close to someone. The yellow fluid on the gauze around the bloodstains, the cortisone spray that would have made Papa scream if he’d had the strength: my stain, my shock, and my scream.

A brain lesion gave him double vision. Everything wore a register of itself, a crown of haze. It amused him to watch people walking around with the ghosts of themselves stuck to their skins. Papa’s knee had ripped open when he fell off a ladder while trying to repair a broken window sash. Frantic to protect us, to seal every entry, he had crawled from his sickbed while my mother was at work at the Sunshine Biscuit factory and I was at school. A killer who called himself the Zodiac was roaming the Bay Area. He was sending letters with obscene ciphers to the San Francisco Chronicle.

"Isabel," said my father, his fingers brushing first the specter of my face and then my face. The rind of the moon cut through the windowpane. The wallpaper was an old pattern of "The Strawberry Thief," with sharp birds poking through tall red grasses. Saint Anthony of love and lost things had an arm span covering half the top of the bureau, and someone had sent over a plug-in picture, with a lightbulb in the back, of Saint Lucy with her plate of eyeballs. Papa was forty-two; he would stay posed in time with black hair. He did not know how to guard me anymore. He could no longer hide the newspapers, as he had when Richard Speck murdered those nurses in Chicago. Fear gives off a smell. That’s how evil finds its victims, Isabel. If you don’t give it off, you’ll be safe, you won’t get hurt in the dark.

I told him he must stop worrying. The Zodiac would not bother coming to our town: what was here? Every morning I walked to the boulevard to catch the bus to Bishop Delancy High School in Oakland, and we passed the Adobe Feed Store, where my father had said that hiding in the sacks were eggs, smaller than the eye could see, waiting to hatch into vermin. And sometimes I had caught it, in the days of holding his hand when we went to buy chicken scratch. The sacks jumped, they stirred a bit, moth wings straining against the weight of the feed. Eggs and wings: I thought of death as white. Our morning bus passed the Miniature Golden-Tee, with its hydra-head of neon dragons guarding the windmills, clowns with big mouths waiting for a golf ball to gag them, and a little Wild West corral with a gate that gave out a horse whinny again and again as it swung open. What was in San Damiano? It sounds like a place with terra-cotta earth and a Spanish mission, but it was an ordinary suburb, house after house with those netless basketball hoops, with a gauntlet of stores on San Damiano Boulevard. People favored wind chimes in the shape of pagodas, which they bought in Chinatown in San Francisco, as if crossing the bridge was going from part A of the world to part B, and the winds blew in and tilted the pagodas and no one ever straightened them; there was always a faint music, a trickle, really, coming from these shattered columns of pagodas.

I was in love with someone who was leaving me his own lessons in being unafraid. James was a tall Filipino boy in my sophomore class who wore three-piece business suits on Free Dress Day and smoked cigars with the Asian kids in the parking lot, and once when Sonny Barger and some Hells Angels rode through, as they did now and then, James threw a flaming butt end at one of them and got flipped off but not hurt. I understood that the motorcyclist admired James for a moment, and it thrilled me, to watch how someone could go straight toward points of fear.

Violet Wong, my best friend, would get onto the bus with me at the San Damiano stop, and she’d take out the green eye shadow she’d stolen from her mother. We’d put it on with our fingers, and my lashes were so long that they stroked green dust onto the inside of my glasses. She wanted to help me be beautiful for James. I had written a speech for him, and he won the regional Lions Club contest with it and would go on to the state finals. He had not told me that he won; one of his friends did, and when I went to him, he said, "I was going to tell you, Isabel." I wanted him to bury his face in my hair and wet my scalp with his mouth, to breathe my name back to me inside my ear.

How could I explain any of this to my father—the odd, awful timing of my love? I’m not scared of anything, Papa. That was all I could manage. "That’s good!" he whispered. "I don’t want you taking a stitch in my arm."

"No, I won’t, Papa," I said, and we laughed.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Our-Lady-of-the-Artichokes-and-Other-Portuguese-Am,673961.aspx.

Visit Katherine Vaz’s Web site.