The Sea Latch

When I wake our first day at the Sea Latch, my mother and Agnes sit on the motel’s carpeted porch, smoking as they gaze over the railing at the passing cars. The sound of the Atlantic Ocean’s slow suck carries across the motel parking lot. Route 1, the coastal highway that runs through York, passes directly in front of the motel. You can see the highway’s glittering gray pavement and the boardwalk’s sandwich stands, but not the water. Still, the salt-air smell makes its way to us, the wind that carries it over the dunes bracing and wet and alive.

The Defense

Turner had been thinking for the many months of his recovery about visiting Brian up in Jackson Hole when he was well enough to travel again, but then, just a day before he planned to go—he was actually mapping out his route in the too-large and too-empty house on Maxwell Avenue—he got a call from his little sister Maggie in Columbus. She had news. And a request.

The blood was the mountain and the mountain was the bear

Eliot tried to run his hand through his hair, which had clumped in dark, greasy hanks. Stubble sanded his neck and sunken cheeks, and it was almost as if he could feel his skin wrapping around the contours of his ribs and the ropes of sinew running through his legs. As if he’d been shrink-wrapped. As if all the air was being sucked from him by an invisible machine. He could smell himself. He knew there was an insanity to the way he appeared. His thoughts that day had been of blood and damage.

A Cruel Gap-Toothed Boy

The school principal is of no use, cannot do or refuses to do anything other than occasionally suspend this “Nate” for a handful of school days, which to a boy of that sort is more holiday than exile, giving him schoolless days on which he must do nothing aside from wander the beach throwing rocks at boats he doesn’t own and plotting how he might next make Emma hate herself a little bit more.

Vanishing

The rain had come on suddenly, soaking them partway to the skin, this on top of the spattering of mud all three wore on their shins and calves as well as the pronounced stripe of spray from the rear wheel up the backs of their shirts. They were almost in town, were patiently waiting their turn to pass through a bottleneck at the stop sign near the university, when it happened: Basil, at almost a full stop, and unable to remove his shoes from the cleats, fell over, fully attached to his bike.

The Good Stone

At the first clear indication that his health was in decline, Jefferies kept a promise to himself and put in his two weeks at the corporate office in Phoenix, showing up in his best suit and shoes to say his farewells. He had just suffered his first stroke—a “pinprick,” the doctor had called it, though it had felt more like a broadsword passing through the left side of his head—and for the first time in his life, at seventy-two, Nigel Jefferies was feeling his age.

The Numbers Man

Instead of setting his alarm Paul Lake decided to stay up all night. He was fifteen and had stayed up all night twice before for no reason, daring himself, mostly, and he decided to do it again because he did not want to miss Emily, who was coming to pick him up at five o’clock the next morning. Emily was twenty-five. She was his step-aunt—the sister of his father’s new wife. His father’s new wife, Barbara Lewis, was thirty-five. His father was forty-five. Though Paul mostly disliked his stepmother, this tidily ascending numerical ziggurat pleased him, his father on the top step and himself on the bottom and the two women set between them.

Trickster

I met the trickster in a chat room when I was sixteen. Turned out he was in high school with a friend of mine. She didn’t know him, she said. But she’d seen him pack himself inside a locker once, said he’d laughed for an hour straight in class until the teacher made him leave, and then he’d walked outside and stood on the other side of the classroom window, still laughing, his face pale, his hair pulled up and split by the wind and rain.

Swarm

The new house was a horror. Martin and his wife remarked on it each time they turned onto Minuteman Road and were struck by the bald ostentation. The house, constructed in just three months, appeared to have been modeled after a Palladian villa. It was fronted by a columned entry with a pediment like a dunce cap, and its symmetrical wings were shot through with fussy, arched windows. Although the structure was set back from the road, the owners had perversely removed the trees at the property’s front edge and installed a squat stone wall flecked with mica. Neither of them were typically prone to prejudgment, but Martin and Philomena considered themselves people of modest leanings and allowed themselves the small, wicked gratification of condemning the owners’ taste.

Jennifer, Naked

Jennifer, my then wife Jennifer, sat naked on the beach sheet in her lean, youthful beauty. The rest of us—me and my friend and colleague Sam Franklin and Elsa, his wife—we had bathing suits on. We sat under a high dune as the tide went out, leaving a wide swathe of smooth, wet sand.

New Heaven

I was twenty-seven years old and working a dead-end job in the city when I discovered that my grandmother, who’d died young in 1955, had been a nymphomaniac too.

Project X

The trip couldn’t have mattered more: it was my first, and the potential client was worth half a billion dollars. Maybe I wasn’t flying to London, Tokyo or Dubai as I’d often imagined, and maybe the shuttle was too small to have a business class, but after three years of work, I was finally getting a foretaste of the future and a chance to prove myself. Since I’d started, a callow Math and Economics BSc from Yale, I’d long mastered the spreadsheets I used, also improved them and created some new ones, become a real pitch book wizard in the process, but as far as meeting clients went, I was still a nobody in a fancy suit. Then all at once everything changed.

The Queen of Pacific Tides

Ten years ago today my father went overboard in a stern trawler fifty miles offshore, and I’m headed down to the breakers for an omen. It’s early morning, and the clouds are cutting strips of the Pacific clean silver when I slip down the bluffs to the beach. It’s a steep path, lined with ferns and trillium that bloom purple and white. The shore is dotted with the last of the night smelters hauling their loads into rust-checkered pickups. The waves are out with the tide, leaving traces of foam on the shore like a comb over wet hair. The Eureka Fish Company lurks on the horizon, jutting out on barnacled pilings into the Pacific like an old ship on stilts, the aluminum roof reflecting patches of early light. Here, the stink and rot of the cannery fades into tufts of sea-spray. I can see our fleet of purse seiners, trollers and old-time squid jiggers in the docks, idle and giant. From this distance, most people would mistake the cannery for the flotsam of development hanging over the ocean, an eyesore of industry, but to me it’s more than just fish scales and mung. It’s got a berth that holds vats of cod and the pulse of Eureka in its floors. Made of dusty redwood planks that creak in the tides, it’s home: our airless, two-bedroom apartment saddles the scaling room. It’s where Mama keeps the books and where, above a shipment of herring and sea bass, I was born.

Security

Supposedly when you tear your ACL, you hear a loud pop: God’s hands clapping once. I didn’t hear anything. I tore the ACL and the MCL and part of the thigh muscle that I don’t remember the technical term for. If I had known something was wrong, I could have just stayed down there. Pain is our vehicle for understanding.

The Essentials of Acceleration

I’m a good driver, and by this I don’t just mean safe. Like a good runner who doesn’t waste motion in her stride, I maneuver my car with dexterity and precision. I merge smoothly and without braking. In three moves, I can parallel park on both sides of the street. One of my friends is the mechanic at the corner garage. He respects my studious approach to the art of driving, and I admire his work. He’s honest and his hours are reliable, unlike the dry cleaner up the street who repeatedly closes at ten to seven and will not open the door even if you point out the time. Leo, the mechanic, is Mexican. His family also owns Guadalajara, across the street, where I occasionally have a burrito.

Grasshopper Kings

His son flings the stick behind the hedges when he spots the car approaching. Flynn is home late again. The boy is on the front lawn in a shirt with the sleeves cut off, his wiry arms behind his back now. Even from a distance, Flynn saw the flames eating the end of the stick. The smoke hovers around his son’s head like an apparition as Flynn steps toward him. Ryan, my sweet boy, he says, I thought we’d put this fire business behind us.

Unintended

Shinji arrived at his cousin’s house early Monday afternoon after a four-hour train ride from Tokyo. His cousin’s wife, Yumi, was the only one home. Despite short notice, she immediately made Shiji feel welcome. Over some tea and homemade apple cake—she said she taught cooking classes at a local cultural center—they had their semi-introductory conversation. They had never had a chance to sit down and talk one-on-one before. And in the course of this initial chat, she told him about an incident involving her son Kazuo.

Wildflowers of the Western Chaparral

Mr. Lohnert acts as though he doesn’t notice that home or its occupants whenever he passes by now, as though there is nothing there but a giant hole at the end of a short driveway to nowhere, even though they’ve been neighbors nearly forever. If any of them is outside their old moss-sided white double-wide, especially her, he will cross the terracotta-colored road and then the ditch, walking right through if the water is running high, getting wet to his knees. Sometimes when he’s crossing, he feels the way an escaped prisoner from years ago must have, sensing the bloodhounds close behind, knowing he is barely a creek and a hillside scramble away from being apprehended.

The Caretaker

They were dogging bear again. It was the fourth night that autumn he’d been woken by the bawling hounds. The din they made put them someplace on the two-track, not far above the breaks that marked the western edge of Hannah Tucker’s property. A halfhearted drizzle plunked along the Airstream. Hoping against hope that the poachers, plotts and blueticks would turn away from Hannah’s, Tom Phillip climbed from bed and staggered the three short steps past his toilet, couch and kitchen. It was cold inside the trailer. As Tom knelt to light the stove, there came the unmistakeable clamor of the pack lining out on a scent, baying their quarry down the saddle from the upland.

Race

Hakim woke early the morning of the half-marathon—six A.M.—the last Saturday in August, though the race didn’t start until seven-thirty. Sarah, his renter, had to be at the Yeast-I-Can-Do at five, so she made coffee before she left, though never strong enough, and he added a spoonful of instant to the carafe. Sarah had an upstairs room—renting, for Hakim was an experiment whose verdict was still out. The house was too big for one person, and Hakim liked having the extra money for utilities, which in a small town were expensive. He didn’t mind Sarah’s peculiarities. She kept an odd schedule, sometimes in bed at seven, sometimes going out with friends and staying out all night. She was tall and had wild red hair and had come from Vermont to ice climb, though it was summer when people got work and fall when rooms and apartments opened up. She had broken up with her boyfriend, with whom she’d been camping, and maybe because she was twenty-six, half as old as he was, he found himself focusing on her comings and goings more than he wished to.

The Miracle Worker

When Mrs. Mansour first came to the house, I thought she was alone. Naturally I could see only her face; the rest of her had been draped in the traditional black. But there was something modern about her right away, even ignoring the fact that she had arrived without a husband. She wore sunglasses—Chanel, I learned, as she approached—and deep red lipstick.

Hector Composes a Circular Letter to His Friends to Announce His Survival of an Earthquake, 7.8 on the Richter Scale

Mexico City. 23 September, 1985

Dear David,

Knowing that a letter from me has slightly more chance of reaching you across the world than one sent to me here (my local post office is a heap of stone), I’m preempting your question and (I trust) your concern by making the following announcement: I AM ALIVE.

Searching for Intruders

This was while Alethea’s cancer was taking over again, but before we realized it. We had been getting along well again, renting a house back in Reading. There was a heat wave, and we had no air conditioner. It was late, almost 2:00 A.M. We were naked in bed. She was caressing me, and we were about to make love when we heard the screams.

They Whisper

In Vietnamese language school, we sat in lab for two hours every day. We wore headsets and hunkered into vubicles and we talked to Vietnamese speakers on tape, responding to their questions, telling them it is a beautiful morning, thank you very much, I am weary and wish to sleep, can you turn out the light? And we took tests from these tapes, as well, and it was always the same woman’s voice. We had native teachers inour langurage school and finally I got up the nerve to ask someone, but the woman whose voice was on the tape was not one of ours. Nobody knew who she was.

In Between Things

In between things, Parker slept with Rachel. He kept telling himself he wouldn’t do it, even insisted, sometimes out loud, that the mere thought of doing it was completely out of the question.

The Spring House

Both Abraham and Sarah had grown very old, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed to herself and said, “I am past bearing children now that I am old and out of my time, and my …

Balsam

A little awkward, she thought, the morning after your lover has fled, to have breakfast with his mother. A little awkward that the apartment you occupy is attached to her garage, that you haven’t found a job in this little tree-rimmed town full of eclectic approaches to keeping body and soul together. A little awkward that you have no immediate place to go, now that her son has gone.

Kristin’s Uncle Otto

I was struggling with an overgrown border when Sarah’s phone call came. Spring was already galloping ahead. I was heaving out my favourite perennials, pulling them free of the worst of the weeds and dumping them in a heap on the mossy grass. Once this was done, I’d break off anything that was salvageable, heel it into some corner, weed-kill the jungle, then replant. Blitz gardening.

Oh, Such Playwrights!

The cab was a battered canary-yellow Crown Vic, and without question the driver was accelerating in running the traffic signal that had just turned on Ninth Avenue—he must have been doing fifty. When the wailing ambulance arrived from Roosevelt Hospital only a few blocks away, the last thing anybody was thinking about—either the sidewalk bystanders, stunned at what they had witnessed, or the efficient EMS workers—were the scattered sheets of the three copies of the play, let loose from the gray cardboard box that all but detonated in the impact.

Dishonor

After the long trek to Tallil, the President called the whole thing off and they returned by Humvees and Chinooks to Saudi to await further orders. It was in camp there that Phillip beat a boy within an inch of his life, a PFC improbably named Francis China; he’d cut in front of Phillip at chow, possibly unwittingly. The kid probably wasn’t even nineteen. He was nothing to Phillip Dante. Just some kid who’d ended up on the wrong end of his infinite anger.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

At his apartment, after work, him studying from the kind of book you’d keep a door open with. They did not discuss his concern about the licensing exam. She wanted to go out, but he said he really had to study. The fan going. A clean-line apartment building. The walls were all white. He had put up a number of large photographs of him and his father, sailing competitively. Dark blue water and a sharp white sailboat named Madeline, its sails bulging. His mother had taken the photographs. The girlfriend never asked him about this.

Darwin’s Lotus

The evolution of a species was echoed in the evolution of an individual-they rhymed, he’d write, the development and diversification of a progress of an particular feature similar to the progress of an idea-and after tea and biscuits in the basement, after opening the morning’s mail, after tending to his climbing plants in the study, the old man laid the grey heron out on his work table and opened her lengthwise. In the tight crop of the bird he found small stones, bits of shell, of seaweed, a smooth blue fish. In the belly of the fish he found the silver grizzle of a smaller fish. And in that grey paste he found the hard pearl of a berry.

The Silver Bullet

By the summer of 1984, bankruptcy was so close we could taste it. It tasted like beans, which we ate with growing frequency, and it tasted like fear. It tasted like the cigarettes my mother lit one off the next. My father, meanwhile, fell into deep silences. He stood with his arms crossed, contemplating our many orange Herefords, once valuable enough to warrant his near-constant attention, now worth less than three dimes a pound. The cows looked back, chewing their cuds, oblivious to soaring feed prices, unacquainted with terms like “mortgaged” and “remortgaged.” Neighbors came by to look at the equipment, offering such trifling amounts that my father’s face reddened. He turned them down, but they called again, offering less.

In the Mosque of Imam Alwani

This was when they lived in the eternal city. It seemed possible that the trio’s little corner of the Kurdish spring—the square chimneys of the brick kilns unfurling their listing columns of black smoke into the high, clear light, the sloped, red sides of the river, secreted within the ellipses of bank woods and seething with insects in the lambent dawn before the air filled with the clattering gossip of the washerwomen and the collisions of the silver-voiced children worrying its shallows—had, since the beginning of time, continued in just this way in its sounds and habits, relying on no allegiance other than the residents’ curious sense of belief in their own perpetuity. This was when Bajh and Asti and Araz all lived there together, when they were young and the fields and herds still seemed born entirely anew each spring; this was when it was still their city to have.

A Heavy Breath

Her breakfast tasted like whale. It was a perished, fishy flavor that covered everything on her plate. Pauline swallowed her bacon and beans in several masses, leaving only drips of pork fat to be sopped up with yesterday’s bread. She and Ezra ate in silence while the baby slept. When Ezra’s plate was cleaned, he wiped his hands on the linen of the tablecloth, gulped down his coffee and rose to dress for work. He put on his bloodstained clothes.

Stay up with Me

Henry is in the part of the dream where his father carries him piggyback through the shoulder-high waves. His father’s T-shirt is soaked through, and the salt water is making the cut on Henry’s elbow sting, when a woman’s voice calls out, “Henry . . . Henry.”

After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes

Why had Amy gone off for a walk? He knew that her conference—an international gathering of Emily Dickinson scholars—did not begin for another day. Was she angry at him for sleeping so late? The night before, she had quickly brushed her teeth, worn her old nightgown and fallen sleep, but he had stayed awake, jazzed by the long flight from Boston and the taxi ride through the strange city. He’d moved in close to Amy, wanting to feel the curve of her long body, but she’d muttered in her sleep and turned away. Sleep, when it came for him, had been a series of jumbled dreams.

The Wrong Man

On the evening of June 17, 1994, when Al Cowlings drove O.J.’s white Bronco fifty miles down I-405 followed by twenty helicopters and god knows how many police cars, I was working in nearby El Segundo, California, at a halfway house for men, debating what to do with the rest of my life. Through the first half of college I had planned to apply to law school, but my parents had gotten me a job at their firm the summer before my junior year, and most of my time was spent in a storage closet searching cases for mention of water rights, which made law school look much less appealing. That fall I took a social work elective on human development and began working with underprivileged children, a job I liked because it suited my nosy nature and gave me the opportunity to tell people what to do. As a lawyer I would only be involved in one side of a case (and a boring one at that, it seemed), with the verdict left in someone else’s hands, but as a social worker, I learned, I’d be making actual decisions with consequences that would better people’s lives. Plus, I wouldn’t have to go to grad school to start practicing. So I switched majors my junior year and started my job a week after graduation.

The City of the Dead

The first time I went to visit Dr. Hill at Park View, I brought him a bouquet of flowers. It would be six weeks before the headstone would be in, and the grave was gutted-looking still, like new gardening. It all looked a little vulgar and exposed, and I didn’t like to look at it straight—though it was true I’d seen Dr. Hill much more exposed than this. “Don’t get used to this,” I said, laying the flowers at his grave. Dr. Hill didn’t respond, but then he’d never been talkative when I knew him in this life, either.

The Floating Life

We cluster around the radio in the teachers’ berth. I twist the dial to 16, the hailing and distress channel, and Dave holds a hand up for silence, even though nobody’s talking. Most of the message is static, but it sounds bad. Ports are closed all along the northern coast of Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Virgin Islands. The throaty, Spanish-inflected voice of the Coast Guard broadcaster tells us to switch to 22A, and we do, straining for specifics of the attack, or whatever it is. I can make out snatches only: stay at sea . . . hazards . . . we don’t know . . . repeat stay . . . as it comes in. The distant sound of hip-hop drifts from the dormitory berths; the students are enjoying a normal afternoon below deck, unaware. The satellites are down. The computers and the handheld devices search endlessly for signals.

The Long Net

Winner of the 2010 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Fiction.
The summer I was ten, among other troubles, there was a heat wave unlike anyone could remember, including my mother, whose memory was as strong as most people’s forgetting. Heat is shocking when you’re close to the ocean but not in it. It feels like an injustice, a spectacle—even children do things they might not otherwise do.

Fergus

On that Friday Carl Timm had done nothing, just surfed the web at work hunting down torque specifications for luxury sedans he would never, ever have true interest in or means for purchasing-specifications that would embed themselves in his memory, as if to be kept handy for manly conversation among man-friends in some faraway world. At five to five he’d driven home in his used-looking Saturn wagon, muddy maroon, and butted it up against the thawing grass in his backyard. His house was wedged in on a forgotten corner in northeast Minneapolis, across the street from a foundry; the siding had been hammered by thick specks of black dust for years.

Emma Won’t Get Better

It’s a strange thing to be the one going through a tragedy. All day long you bump into people, especially in a place like Tucson, and they are nice, but their lives go on. Sometimes you see it on their faces, the realization: when they’re just being polite, asking you how you are, and their public face crumples because they suddenly remember. You do your best then to let them off the hook.

Even the Gargoyle Is Frightened

Gandhi Is Dead

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In the Quiet

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First Meeting

Hey there. My name is Connie Aderholt, and I’m an alcoholic. From way back. About the time I changed from Conrad to Connie after a baseball player, that was when I got hooked on hooch. All kinds, canned brew to cinnamon schnapps, Mateus to single barrel scotch. Fifteen, just barely, brought to it in a shed behind the Starfest Café by Ellie Winston, who was stripped to heels, hose and a choker ribbon with a quart of Beam raised high in each hand.

How I Came to Love You Like a Brother

At the mention of the other woman, our mother spat. Once, I suppose, she would have wanted to know more, like what did he do, or how old were the children, or what were their names, or did they play musical instruments, and she might have told him that Lucia could recite thirty Chinese poems by the time she was three, or that she was a real talent on the flute, or that Lucia’s great-grandfather, originally a poor rice farmer, escaped from Qing militarists to become Sun Yat-Sen’s right-hand man in 1912.

Florida Lives

Roaches don’t die easy deaths; they can survive nearly anything. Everywhere else I’ve ever lived-New York, San Francisco, a rented cottage in Alaska-they call them roaches. But in Florida, a blend of kudzu and heat, a mixture of North and South, a dangling participle on the United States, they are palmetto bugs.

Of Questionable Provenance

The autumns I come to New York for the antiquarian book fair, it is my habit before breakfasting to walk from my hotel up Fifth Avenue to Seventy-second Street and then back through the park, where the people who acknowledge my “Good morning” are invariably men or women of a certain age. My own age, much to my surprise, now groups me with them, and my preoccupations with self, such as they were, have ebbed to the point where I am more interested in other people’s lives than in my own.

I Think You Think I’m Still Funny

On that Friday Carl Timm had done nothing, just surfed the web at work hunting down torque specifications for luxury sedans he would never, ever have true interest in or means for purchasing-specifications that would embed themselves in his memory, as if to be kept handy for manly conversation among man-friends in some faraway world. At five to five he’d driven home in his used-looking Saturn wagon, muddy maroon, and butted it up against the thawing grass in his backyard. His house was wedged in on a forgotten corner in northeast Minneapolis, across the street from a foundry; the siding had been hammered by thick specks of black dust for years.

The Church at Yavi

Nan phoned late one evening, a month after the funeral. Like Frank, she was devastated, unable to sleep. Unlike him, she thought something could be done about it.

The Year of Perfect Happiness

Soon, though, he discovers an underside to Amanda’s personality, the way you do when you spend your nights and mornings and weekends with a person. Amanda’s underside is hard, gritty, sharpened. She becomes increasingly competitive, at first only in athletics, pushing him to accompany her on advanced hikes, and then eventually in everything, like whose childhood was more fraught or who lost more weight on the glycemic-index diet that they decided to try or who has a more neutralized carbon footprint, blah, blah, blah.

The Linkage of Bone

Terrance’s accident made the local papers. He was working on a circuit breaker forty feet off the ground between the Chevrolet dealer’s show lot and the Pizza Factory in Kalispell. He had rerouted the power grid so he could work on the local transformer. There was a checklist of things he’d gone through and marked with a red Bic pen before he climbed the steel ladder to the high retention wires. He had done everything right, too.

Tomorrow in Shanghai

Zhang Xiaobing would not have called himself a bad person, should anyone have been given the opportunity to pose such a question to the prisoner. In fact, if you asked anyone other than the court-appointed defense attorney whose main function in the trial was to enter Zhang’s guilty plea, the prosecutor and the panel of three judges, who had found him guilty and sentenced him to death, very few people who knew Zhang would have said he was a bad person—wicked, evil, corrupt, a low-born thing, a turtle’s egg, a nonhuman devil whose crimes would merit the ultimate punishment.

Yukon River

It’s 1975, and Len had known about the pipeline. But he thought it would be far away, lost in the immense space of Alaska, a trickle of silver sliding alone silently in the vast slope of snow. As he lay on his bunk in Folsom, he had not thought of it being right here, a fat, ugly snake of greed and pollution; he had not imagined it strangling the little snow-covered log town he had fallen in love with.

Exotic Animal Medicine

“My first vodka as a married woman,” said Sarah. She sat against David and felt the day carry them toward each other. The hours passed at the pub, and they didn’t think of going home, although this was what they looked forward to: the privacy of their bed against smudged windows, its view of small gardens and the beat of trapped bees against glass that shook as the buses moved by.  Their bed was a long way from the colleges and the river, but the bells would still come over the roads and houses, and they would be alone, and married. The day moved them both toward the moment in which they would face each other in their bed, utterly familiar, and see that despite their marriage there was no change, and that this was just what they wanted.

Queen Disease

They came to class in bandages. Girls came to class in bandages. It started six days in. One of the girls was missing, but we still expected her. I stood at the podium in my high heels, pretending to be tall and not thinking of my dead mother.

Tooth

According to subject number 6, in the winter of 1984 inside Nongpo provincial detention center a man known only as i, or Tooth, saved her life and those of countless others solely through clever use of ventriloquism, a skill he used to spook the gulag warders into thinking every life they stole would return as an invisible phantom. Eight years later the same man emerged in Yodok re-education center, this time as a contortionist who, according to subject number 32, was so flexible he could calligraph with his toes, pirouette on one palm and squeeze himself through a car tire—altogether confounding the injurious teachers and making them forget to administer the daily self-criticism exercises. By the time subject number 97 and Tooth crossed paths, the Great Leader’s heart had failed, the great famine had come and gone and the millennium had been celebrated, but Tooth, apparently ageless and vital, was still rescuing North Koreans, now as Yongdam’s resident shaman, a political prisoner who convinced the warders he was capable of killing a man with an angry wink or whistle.

The Mariposa

Luis shared an apartment with his brother Hector and three other men, all of whom happened to be named Juan. Everywhere he turned there was a Juan: a Juan in the shower, a Juan in the kitchen eating pineapple rings out of a can, a Juan asleep on the couch. They were quiet and harmless but undeniably present and numerous, like the silverfish that were also always in the shower and the kitchen and among the couch cushions.

A Man from Zagreb

All that summer in New York she had a special glow. People said things like “Motherhood really suits you!” Or “The baby’s done wonders for you!” But her friend Marta didn’t buy it. Marta already had four children and was planning one or two more.

The Way I Saw the World Then

The day Ms. Moreau would cry in front of her freshman honors English class was the stuff of Lawrence High School legend. It happened every year, could happen at any time. Some innocuous eighth period as the school buses sat chugging by the curb and the minute hand stuttered toward 2:39, Ms. Moreau would announce she was going to read her favorite poem, then read, cry and dismiss the class with a wave of her thick-ringed hand.

Persistent Views of the Unknown

“Should I be afraid?” Jan blurts out. She is not aware of having even framed the thought before the words speak themselves. But once they’re out of her mouth, they seem to hang in front of her, as big as a billboard. Even in her e-mails to Morton she has never expressed this question quite so bluntly before.

Toddy M.

We emerged from the dense flora, came around a bend as the road grew smoother, swung downhill toward the Indian Ocean and saw this naked foreign man surfing the inside of a perfect right-hand point break. He was moving left to right in front of me, gliding down the face of a powerful, beautifully formed cylinder of water. He stood more upright on the yellow surfboard than I would have imagined possible, his stance surprisingly sturdy-looking in spite of, or perhaps because of, his nudity.

The Path of the Left Hand

Globe wasn’t cold in winter, but there were months of less light and more darkness. In other years he’d played tennis, hiked in the mountains and increased his minutes on the stair-step machine, but that December and January he responded as if he were in a state of dormancy, like the fish in Queen Creek that lowered their body temperatures or the snakes that stayed in burrows for days at a time. He rarely went to the gym or the club. He watched television dramas and read English sea novels, and when Julia offered to host a party or they were invited somewhere, he begged off.

In the Sunset

What had that smell been last night? . . . Sex, she thought. That’s what it had been. The smell of sex. Jean had taken the dog for a walk and had sex with a man. While Marc was in Japan, she was having an affair.

Nelson Street

June told her mother about this woman, how she waited in her front yard in order to speak with her father, and how she’d smile with her “big fat lips.” But the mother only laughed and said, “Well, aren’t you the little spy?”

Public Enemy

I was eight years old and just strong enough to slip a shot over the lip of the rim when I heaved it just right. I don’t know how CJ missed me standing at the edge of the playground’s blacktop, crook of my right arm squeezing a basketball, but he did. I wanted to hide or run past them and up to my parents’ apartment, but I ended up backing up to the fence and sitting on my heels like I was watching TV.

Grief

It was snowing when I left the tavern. A couple of inches had accumulated during the hour or so I’d been inside eating a fish sandwich, washing it down with a local IPA. I had just come back crom Portland, Oregon. My daughter, Gabrielle, had died there four years before.

Big Wheels for Adults

Time passed, and Peter didn’t know what to do. He’d never liked long hugs, not even form women, and this was becoming one of the longest of his life.

Double Fish

Finally I figured out [an angle] and give it to the extremely morose man who took money from my children whenever they wanted to catch goldfish in his sad little inflatable pool…. I thought about how teh clientele had changed in the past few years and about what that might mean for the city and the country and my character. I gave him an apartment in the building where my Mandarin teacher lived. Then I gave him a history and waited for it to come back and bite him in the ass, the way all our histories do.

Whatever Happens

“That was Matthew,” he says. “He’s in jail. He said last night-whoever he was with, somebody new, I didn’t recognize the name-I don’t know. He doesn’t remember much. He said they were drinking and then they were fighting and now he’s in jail.” We’re facing each other across our cluttered kitchen, Joe with the phone and me with a wooden spoon, silent-two people who are rarely silent together. Hot oil spatters the back of my hand, and I move the pan off the heat.

“Did he-”

“I don’t know,” Joe says. “All I know is what he told me. I assume she called the cops and they took him in.”

Zippers

I tried to open my eyes on the operating table. I tried to see what I could see. I saw blood, cracked bones, bloody gloves, something with machinery, oxygen, lightning from the heavens and Frankenstein crying, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

Praha

I will never forget, no matter how long I live, the feeling I experienced when I landed a jab to the base of Mansour’s nose, the sudden blossom of blood that issued forth, the disbelieving look on his face that totally eclipsed that first look of surprise on discovering me with his wife.

Sebastian and Roscoe

The eight weeks of basic training at Fort Ord were just about what he’d expected. Then he got his orders. Waited, in a set of starched khakis that felt too stiff, too thin in the October wind, with a dozen other soldiers for the bus to the Army Language School in Monterey. It was already an hour late. Another private behind him griped, “Hurry up and wait,” and he turned to see who, but it wasn’t anyone he recognized. When they finally boarded, the hurry-up soldier sat down beside him, stuck out his hand and said, “Roscoe Drummond.”

Loeka Discovered

There was some thing spellbinding about it, peering down the vast well of time at Loeka’s small, puckered face. While extract ing a tissue sample for analysis, it wasn’t uncommon for any one of us to sing to Loeka sweetly or to talk to him as if he were an obedient child.

What Happened When the Young Woman Turned Thirty-Five

She asked him if he would love her forever, and he knew that in the brief moment that he hesitated, not blurting yes, forever he would love her, she got sad. Years ago her parents had divorced, and she had wanted her family to go back to normal. en both her parents had remarried. Her brother was married, her sister divorced twice and remarried. She constantly wondered if anyone stayed married and happy.

Cooper’s

The creature screeched just as it hit the ice, and he thought he felt the collision there on the shore where he leaned against a knobby sycamore. Then the thing skidded, and there was a little trail of blood.

Final Round

It’s the last round of the fourteenth annual Presbyterian United Bible Quiz, and Freddy Hansook Chung of Glendale, California, is in the lead with 7,300 points — 2,100 ahead of second place. Staring into the dark auditorium where his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Young Min Chung, are sitting with their well-worn Bibles and sending telepathic cheers to their Young American Hope, Freddy takes a deep breath and locks his fingers over the rubber buzzer pod, which by now is as hot and pliant as a woman’s breast, or what he imagines a woman’s breast must feel like. The buzzer even has a nipple, a Phillips-head screw working a dent into his palm with each push, and twice Freddy has given it a gentle squeeze for good luck.

The New Room

“Hard-hearted Hannah,” Patsy called her. The vamp of Savannah, G-A. But Hannah wasn’t from Savannah, she was from Wisconsin. And Patsy stopped calling her that just about the time that Ted began to sleep with her.

Dogs I Have Known

It is said that dogs are good. People with dogs live longer, are happier and are less likely to have their homes burglarized.

I have never owned a dog. This is in part because I am afraid of them but also because I do not want to take care of them. My daughter would love a dog, but I will never buy her one.

So I guess you know what kind of person I am.

Who’s Walking Who?

“Don’t blame Baby,” she would say as I’d rummage through the apartment trying to find the television remote that he’d hidden somewhere or while I held up a job application he’d “marked” before I had a chance to fill it out. “Maybe it’s you,” she’d say. “Maybe he’s trying to tell you something. Don’t forget, he’s a very gifted dog.”

Nathan’s Vision

Nathan Paterne shifted in the white iron chair when his oungest son approached him of a sweltering Sunday afternoon on the narrow front porch and declared, “Paw. I am going to marry.” The world waved unsteadily in the heat as the boy spoke. A moment after, Nathan turned his head and saw the radiant girl, trailed by nightdark hair, riding up the smooth incline of the driveway perched sidesaddle on a camel. He blinked. He looked back to his son, who smiled and darted his eyes nervously toward the girl, then back to him.

Bearskin

The bees in the wall had been flying out in suicide pacts of two, three, five bees at once. They went for Rice’s face and he tried to brush them away with his work gloves, but he’d lost count of the stings. He was removing the last section of paneling when a lone bee stung him dead center on his forehead, which made his eyes water. He blinked hard and kept working, jammed the end of his crowbar under the thin, dusty panels and snapped them away from the studs, then again, moving from floor to ceiling and back down on the other side. When everything was loose he dropped the crowbar and reached back for the sledgehammer,smashed the whole section clattering to the floor.

Ivy: A Love Story

There was something wrong with Nithin, Vrinda’s boy. A hormonal imbalance of some sort that could not be corrected. He was overweight and hoarse and constantly lunging at things. They had moved in two years ago-mother, nine-year-old son and a huge, ferocious Alsatian, his collar buried in his bristling coat. The father was dead, in a car accident whose details could not be properly imagined because it had happened halfway around the world, in Canada, and had involved fog and ice.

Never Trust a Man Who –

In the sopping-wet spring of 1995, Sylvia rode the bus to and from Old Mountain more times than she cared to count. Her twin brother, Drago, was in Kyustendil, doing his military service, and she felt obliged to visit her mother twice as often as usual. When she had been a student, she’d caught any bus she could, usually from Poduene Station, which was a filthy place, thick with fumes and overrun by dogs, full of stalls hawking cheap underwear and overripe vegetables.

Arctic Summer

Even today, I am unsure about a lot of things. I am unsure about what exactly happened to me in Qik that summer, about how much it had to do with the strange beauty of the place-strange enough to put a spell on you. Or how much it had to do with her, or with me.

Whistling in the Louvre

The smell of insanity: acrid, piss-logged wood. The only way they’ll get rid of it, she told us, is to rip up the flooring. The butch could have done it, too, with her bare hands. A jangle of keys, the reassuring click of a tumbler, and we were back in the hall. My wife, with concern in her voice: But one got used to it, right? No, you never do. Twelve years later, sitting on the hospital lawn, I catch a whiff of it in the breeze. I prefer waiting outdoors. Besides, the sun feels good on my face. Fall is in the air. A typical July morning in New Hampshire.

The Fantôme of Fanta

Karl, leaning over his folded knees, gestured with one hand. “He says if we want to climb on the rock, we have to be respectful of the spirits that live there and the ancestors of the people who lived there from before, in villages in the cliffs, and that we should not damage or take anything we find.” Karl turned back to the Chief. “Also, he says to have good experiences.”

Kind

L.E. Miller has published short fiction in Calyx and Scribner’s Best of Fiction Workshops 1999, edited by Sherman Alexie. She lives on Plum Island, on the North Shore of Massachusettes, with her husband and son. She is completing a collection of stories. [2007]

The Three-Sided Penny

Old Foley was the first to discover the thing, followed by your man Terrence Lafferty. Foley brought it into Cleery’s public house to show it off one evening, a year or two gone by now. He was a farmer, Foley was, a poor excuse for a farmer, a man who couldn’t afford the price of a belt so he kept his trousers up with a piece of rope.

Necessary Parts

Mom told me about the diagnosis when we were sitting on a beach in North Carolina. My wife, Helen, had just left to take the puppy for one last run, and I realized that her convenient departure had been prearranged by the way she glanced back at us, biting her lower lip that way she does when she’s worried.

Claw

The house is small, square, and white. The roof’s flat. The door, centered on the eastern side, is just a curtain with red and yellow flowers. The other sides have one square window, also centered. There’s no glass in the windows, just yellowing, loosely woven cotten rags nailed to the wood like mosquito netting. The house sits on a slight rise in the middle of the plain, and anyone looking out the windows could see a long way.

Released

It was my father who was the oarsman, and the last there ever was.

The Worst Thing

You don’t expect to know murderers when their stories make the newspapers. Not if you’re normal. Not if you own a house surrounded by other well-kept houses.

Sublimation

On the flight to India, Ashwin spoke to baby Ravi as though the baby would understand… but he wasn’t really a storyteller, never remembering the orders of events. And anyway, he didn’t enjoy all the truth-bending in children’s literature: the personification of animals and suspensions of disbelief. Not that he was anti-imagination, but he preferred to find the wonder in things that were real and concrete, things he could see for himself.

Quichè Lessons

On Saturday, S’is visited Maximon and gave him a cigar, a pint of liquor–Quezalteco–and a tart of blackberries. The cigar and Quetzalteco were Maximon’s usual gifts, but berry tart was not. The tart was his wife’s idea.

Hum

We could hear it from any point in the house–upstairs, downstairs, even the garage. From the kitchen the sound was faint, like the upswing of a snore with no silent intervals in between: all intake of breath, no release.

Man and Wife

They say every girl remembers that special day when everything starts to change….

“Don’t you want to hear what the big news is?” said Dad. My mother turned her back on us to the cutting board, where she was chopping a fresh salad.

In a small voice I said, “Yes.” I tried to smile, but that feeling was in my stomach, made more fluttery by drink. I recognize the feeling now as a kind of knowledge.

Dial Tone

A jogger spotted the body hanging from the cell tower. At first he thought it was a mannequin. That’s what he told Z-21, the local NBC affiliate. The way the wind blew it, the way it flopped limply, made it appear insubstantial, maybe stuffed with straw.

Like Graceland

Harrison Miller’s wife stood in the shallow end of the pool surrounded by her admirers. From his chaise on the deck, Harrison could see the men’s chests and shoulders, their heads bent toward her, faces expectant.

Biology

The wind lifted. The sky above Sandro’s head was filled with a flurry of little yellow leaves. Frantically airborne, they resisted for one last instant the inevitability of the fall. Sandro sat on a wooden bench, his elbows resting on the picnic table behind him, and gazed up at the sudden pandemonium.

Strangers Among Us

Here she was again, in a strange apartment, at a party, alone. The first glass of wine gulped too quickly. Later, she would be certain it was the backless couch that had caused her to drink too much.

Creve Coeur

The woman who was not my mother was named Sheila Stanton, and at the age of nineteen she was held captive for ninety-one days by the Red Ribbon Strangler. That was during 1967, the Summer of Love. After she was freed by a swat team, Stanton found herself the nation’s celebrity du jour.

The Archimedes Palimpsest

Our lives recall the textual. For one winter of my adult life, my father and I lived in a farmhouse in Boone County, Illinois. This was 1999. My father, Asel Poole, was dying of lymphoma. My wife and I had separated. The earth wintered; the air turned sharp with cold; the fields stretched expansively in white.

The Siege

The men on the walls are all dead. The city is ravaged, but still, somehow, untaken. Imagine, if you will, a cachetic dog limping down a street littered with corpses. Corpses everywhere.

Gathering Up the Little Gods

She has always loved motion. When her legs stride beneath her and her hands cut the air she imagines the muscle and bone that produce her forward movement. She pictures them like a diagram from Grey’s Anatomy, a copy of which she keeps on her bookshelf at home.

Summers in Agaas

All I knew was to pocket some lemons in my favourite sky-blue dress before the scrawny old women realized… and we ran cutting through the light, vaporizing air, the sunrays springing from a blue blue sky, splashing on our hair.

An Art

“We’ll hide here,” my sister Helen said, and pulled me onto a bed of pine straw under the fence at the edge of the ditch. We watched my mother drive slowly through the puddles of our driveway. … My older brother, Hal, had smeared ketchup on the floor of the front room, smudged a wad of his own dark hair and several strands of my sister’s along the edges, and run out the back door. He was hiding in the tractor-shed yard.

Jade

Jade had just turned sixteen. She lived with Coco and Mimi in the second house from the river, a barbershop….Coco and Mimi did business with men.

The Shoe Soiler

The headline in the upper-right-hand portion of the front page caught Rachel’s attention. “University Police Hunt Library ‘Shoe Soiler,’” it read.

Chinatown Mud

It snowed all over Chicago, but in early February it was only New Year’s in Chinatown. And when the next thaw happened in March, it left gobs of soggy firecracker wrappings all over the streets and sidewalks–spitballs forming a wet cushion of Chinatown mud.

Go at Shaktoolik

The cop was after Go-Boy because of this list he was posting all over town–because he had scared this girl, Valerie….Go stayed up all night making her a list titled 101 Thing I Love About Valerie.

Our Stone

I found a large brown boulder one day, and I decided to bring it in. I put it in our living room and then, to please my wife, swept up the trail of dirt it had left on our carpeting. The big brown boulder sat there like it owned the place. I could almost see it cross its arms. Its top was pointy; it had a big bulging belly and a squat base.

At the Beach

Rosa’s cat was short-haired, black and white, with half its left ear torn away and a tail that twitched when the cat meant to do evil. If Rosa failed to notice the tail, the cat might rake claws across her hand as she petted him. She fancied herself a cat lover, but this animal led her to thoughts of betrayal.

Their Bodies, Their Selves

They had lived a clothed life. An accident had changed that. But what was an accident? It was just a word. There was no reason at all that what had happened shouldn’t have happened….[H]ere the two of them sat, Drayton and Sarah Maguire, naked, wilted.

Wild Girls

When Deborah said, “Jason, you know I’m a little in love with you,” he pretended not to hear. Deborah was twenty-one. She was a tattooed and bejeweled art student currently taking a painting class with him.

Let Them Ask

Amali felt the gaze of the other girls studying her as Chamila joined the class. It took all of her concentration to keep a fixed gaze on her notebook, on the neat script of the English letters making up her name. The ‘A’ came up to a determined point that she liked. In English, her name announced itself on the page with strength, like a ladder climbing skyward. In Sinhala, her name began in endless loops, constantly circling themselves, leading nowhere.

Favor

Shuhei was stuck in the odd position of both protecting and despising his friend, or his neighbor, so that at school he would stand up between the moping Hideo and the bigger and rougher boys, who numbered as many as four and would half-encircle him, and when Shuhei intervened he had to withstand the shoves of four pairs of arms against his iron chest. Yet when it was only the two of them, Shuhei, despite himself, would occasionally find himself overcome with annoyance and would push the boy down. This will teach you! he would say as the boy fell to the ground.

Voices

Words come to him at the edge of sleep. Hebrew. Bits of daily prayers, of daily blessing. Fragments in English, voices, many voices, no one he knows: inasmuch as…the forlorn ones…adversary song. A sign of sleep to come.

Treasure

The truth is I never saw the plane.

It was just before ten in the morning and we were in the S formation across the middle of the football field when, on the first note of “76 Trombones,” the unmistakable squack exploded from my clarinet. Split reed. Nothing to do but make the long walk back to the field house and get a new one from my case. I swore, broke ranks, trudged toward the squat building that sat fifty yards behind the end zone.

The Appearance of a Hero

By young I mean twenty-three. By easy I mean the circumstances of my life at the time, by which I mean working five days a week and six hours a day at a job that paid me a great deal of money for little more than terrific hustle and a college degree and very good luck.

Karrooo

I’m heading west on I-80 with my two teenagers, Paul and Allison. We’ve been in the car for almost six hours now, and we’ve settled into out own remote worlds–Allision with her Walkman, me with the radio, and Paul still playing that computer game in the back seat.

Fish

Paul is driving on the southern tip of the Maine Turnpike when the first snowflake falls, a lonely ephemeral shape that dissolves on the glass as soon as it hits. He glances at the urn in the backseat, sitting upright in a cardboard box with the seatbelt cinched tightly around the box, squuezing it slightly out of shape.

Stay

When they asked, I told them I wanted the dog that would take up the most space in my house. They opened a heavy door, went into the back and came out with a giant.

We Think the World of You

For months Allen Jensen moped ceaselessly, then fell into something deeper. He blamed his job at first, then the unexpected death of a cousin he had never really known, but finally he concluded that there was no reason at all for his feelings of sadness and dread. He, himself, was the reason.

The Mozambique Channel

My childhood was spent in a garden. This garden was in Egypt, a few miles outside Cairo, but its furnishings were English–ponds and pergolas and rose beds. There were majestic eucalyptus trees, with which I communed–children are natural animists.

My Mouth, Her Sex, The Night, My Heart

Her Breasts. She was wearing one of those dresses with a hole at the top, like someone had cut a circle out of the fabric, so her breasts were sort of framed and you got to see all the way to the bottom, full inward curve, her pretty brown skin shining under the lights with this hot strip of air between them where I wanted my tongue to go.

This Way, Uncle, into the Palace

My nephew Xuan, now forty and too old for such talk, used an American expression I had never heard before, and after his wife explained it to me in laborious detail I briefly fell deaf. This was at out annual family picnic in Fresno, under a shade tree. When my hearing disappeared I pretended nothing had happened…

Secret Histories

When I was twenty-two, I moved out of my parents’ house in the Maryland suburbs and down into Washington D.C. I was fresh out of art school with a hundred dollars in the bank, an entirely useless degree in drawing and painting, no job and no place to live.

The Bride from the Village of Deaf-Mute

“Mamye, how many times do I have to ask you to get rid of those Chickens?” Shrubek set the bags of groceries on the windowsill and stood to watch the five scrawny chickens scratching and pecking at the balcony, trying to unearth imaginary kernels from the concrete.

Slow Motion

“You made me leave work for this?” Henry asked. I could tell he was trying not to look at me by how hard he stared at the road, by how his hands gripped the steering wheel where they usually rested, tapping out a tune that I never knew. I pressed the handkerchief he’d given me against my nose.

Rash

It’s better to share a rash with someone else than to endure one on your own. My brother Bernie and I had a mutual rash on two occasions. The first time was from the shoe polish we used to black up our faces in the middle of the night to go to vandalize Mrs. Turner’s lawn jockeys. The second time was from the quiche we mashed in each other’s faces on the night our father left. In between those two outbreaks, I suffered the rash over fifty times by myself.

Color of the Sea

Tell me about loneliness.

At 1:45 in the morning, the sky, the sea and the horizon were all the same greasy black. Andrew Shields lay streched out on a life preserver casing, smoking a Lucky Strike, the diesel-tossed wind curling his hair, the ferry’s engines throbbing below him.

Tenses

We’d only been in Otsu two months when Greg stopped speaking English to me. Not cold turkey. A little less English here, a little more Japanese there–a little and a little, and little by little I realized that I never understood him, that instead of speaking he just made noises at me.

The Passage

It was an unseasonably chilly day in late September, 1959, when Joe Bill Kendall waved to his parents from the aft deck of the French-flagged freighter Marion Lykes.

Ice Fishing

On a frozen lake a man is fishing. The sun–no warmer than a star–hangs over the spruce. Winter in Montana. The Pintlar Mountains rise to the east.

Epiphora

In the spring, I moved from an apartment near the university into a rented house on the scrubby southeast edge of Tuscon. In deciding on the house, I’d focused on small things I liked: white hexagonal tile set in black grout in the bathroom, a bedroom closet I could lie down in.

The O’Reilly Factor at 5 P.M., 8 P.M., 1 A.M.

EVERY MONDAY, Wednesday, Friday, Mr. Lenzen would get a shower and, if necessary, a shave. Baths were easier in a practical sense—if he slipped and fell showering, ankle, wrist and hip bones could break but he insisted on showers. They …

Dog Story

She was remembering a time she and her husband had taken a child to the circus. There had been clowns and animals and pink-shirted bareback riders, and the little girl had decided she would herself become a circus performer when she grew up.

Family Planning

Instead of the gold-plated onion domes Josie had hoped for, the view from their room revealed only the grimy, cement backside of the Oktyabrskaya metro station, where a few merchants had set up tables selling flimsy newsprint magazines bearing pictures of naked women.

Why People Say Two Thousand

My mother and husband died nineteen days apart, and the next time I put on shoes it was four months later. The cable was disconnected, yellowing newspapers were logjammed on the porch and Brisket and Chervil had hunkered down with Sonya next door in the name of reliable food.

Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife

On Friday my wife, Catrine, kicked me out of the house. On the following Thursday she called me at my room in the Budget Inn and said, “I want you to come with me to the Lizzie Borden House and Bed and Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts.”

Bringing Ararat

On the Friday that they received the money from his father, Harrut had gone for a swim. He got off work in the early afternoon, stripped to his boxer shorts and dove, crashing through some shallow waves, into the sea.

1987, The Races

Oaklawn dwarfed them, white and haughty as a plantation, four tall stories with flags waving out front. Police directed traffic around the building, blowing their whistles in its shadow. His father drove an entirely red car that was eleven years old.

Emeritus

Behind building 400, I watched an elderly man in a very worn, untucked button-down shirt and a pair of thin, light blue shorts shuffle around the back of a delivery truck.

The Edge of the World

It was said that boys should go on their first sea voyage at the age of ten, but surely this notion was never put forth by anyone’s mother. If the bay were to be raised one degree in temperature for every woman who had lost the man or child she loved at sea, the water would have been boiling, throwing off steam even in the dead of winter, poaching the bluefish and herrings as they swam.

Islamadora

The women of the office gather around Pilar’s desk to play Who Has the Worst Children. The higher up they are in the office hierarchy, the more offensive and shocking their offspring. Allison, Pilar’s boss and the CEO of the company, has four-year-old twin boys who dumb Hershey’s syrup on the couch and call each other “shit-head.”

Social Discourse, 1944

“Hello,” said Bobby Houston. He was slight, with wire-rimmed glasses over pale, almost white-blue eyes. He had a nervous tic — his left hand jabbed out. She could see through his skin.

Diablo

Ofelio Campos stood at the edge of the eleventh sloor, dreaming of beds. He thought of showroom floors and king-sized mattresses. He thought of sultanish waterbeds spotted like leopards. He thought of pillows. He thought of freshly washed sheets, crips from the dryer, of a comforter he once slept under in a Las Vegas motel, folding him in like the wings of a bird.

A Good Boy

For hours now Dobrin has been begging Stassi to stop it, shut up, are you trying to make her mad? “Put those down,” he hisses, whispering, though his mother lags too far behind to hear.

Bernard Jr.’s Uncle Luscious

“We don’t wanna go,” the boys said at the same time. It was the first Saturday of the summer, and they were salting a slug under the pecan tree out back.

Delicate Touch

Kazu Takamura sat upright on the cream-colored leather couch, which took some effort as the couch was wide and deep, designed to relax people. But Kazu Takamura was not relaxed. He glanced nervously at the secretary again. She sat at a computer, her eyes glued to the screen. She had told him it would only be a few minutes, but that had been fifteen minutes ago.

Connect

I stopped taking the heroin. At least for now. I made no vows. I didn’t go to a place where I paid people to tell me heroin is bad. I didn’t find eternal love or realize that drugs are Satan’s ambrosia. I just stopped.

The Shortest Distance Between Me and the World

Our town has no streets. Paths wind through it. We’re surrounded on three sides by a city residential area. Three long narrow streets are all that seperate us from the city. One side of our town ends at the edge of a city cemetary. I love our town.

Ongchoma

Lynn is taking her mother to the plastic surgeon’s office in Scottsdale, driving west on McKellips, past industrial lost and fields of dry weeds. Her mother, a small, pretty woman in an owl-print blouse, fold and unfolds a handkerchief in her lap as she stares out the window. Terrence, Lynn’s roommate, sits in the backseat, leafing through a brochure on plastic surgery.

Blood and Bones

Fernando listened for the cow’s labored breaths. Something within him said a calf would be born that night and that the birth would be a hard one. His father had trained him to sense what was around him, to listen to his instincts. Instinct and a good pistol, his father had said, were the only things a man could count on.

The Wolf House

That Sunday morning, when I told her, “Mrs. Wolff is dead,” my mother groaned, cocked her head, pursed her lips and said, in a voice barely loud enough to hear, “Che peccato.” The next day she lay in her bed, sick, calling to me in her Death Voice, “Andrew? Andrew? Sei tu, Andrew?

The Pond

These things happen: my husband asks me for a divorce, and the next morning the pond is gone. He comes rushing into the bedroom that he didn’t sleep in last night, where I lie facing the wall, finally asleep after crying my goddamn eyes out all night–can you imagine asking someone for a divorce?

Wired for Life

Janie met the electrician Charlie Song in August. The AC adapter to her laptop had frayed, and the connection kept failing. Thus, she was forced to jiggle the plug until the current returned, at which points she would have to remain very still for many minutes at a time–she worked with her laptop on her actual lap, which was ridiculous, she knew, pathetic, but there you have it–lest the sadistic plug icon disappear and the machine revert to battery mode, which was supposed to last six hours but which ran down (and this Janie had timed) in seventeen and a half minutes.

Custodian

The hedge hides the five-foot chainlink fence in Manny’s backyard. Yellow-green, green, dark and soft-looking at ten P.M. He planted it when Cesar started fifth grade, and now his boy is a senior. And a father!

The Non-Swimmer

Robby Travers, a boy of fourteen, took off his T-shirt and sneakers and stuck his toe in the pond at his grandparents’ farm. It was morning, and the sun was warm, but the shade of the willow tree and the water were cool. Robby hugged himself and hunched his shoulders–a reflex to cover his chest, which dipped in the middle like someone had taken an ice-cream scoop to it.

The Ring of Progress

In the spring of 1968 a dozen progressive parents leagued up to drive out the principal of our county school. His name was Reilly. He was a choleric, paunchy man of sixty with a sneak’s gait who stank of liquor and often smoked two cigarettes at once. Not a single child in the school–not the most innocent first grader–had been spared Reilly’s thirty-inch cedar paddle, which he called Skipper.

Docent

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen from hither and yon, and welcome to the Lee Chapel on the campus of historic Washington and Lee University. My name is Sybil Mildred Clemm Legrand Pascal, and I will be your guide and compass on this dull, dark and soundless day, as the poet says, in the autumn of the year.

Food

Grist for the mill, he decided. Food for thought. Or maybe it all was thought, meditation, the torturing examining-the-life process all the wise ones prattled about. But why every midnight?

When the Beatles Lived Next Door

He told me they lived next door. He stood pressing against the split-rail fence that separated our yards and pointed his thumb over his shoulder.

Eiders

I set decoys–my father called them tollers–by dropping their small steel anchors overboards, paying out line. They had thin keels on their underbellies that kept them pointed in the same direction, lookin exactly like any raft of ducks you’d see up the cove.

The Alphabetic Book Club

One November afternoon, my father closed the stationery store half an hour early to prepare for the arrival of the Alphabetic Book Club. He thought out front lawn needed to be raked first, even though I insisted it would be to dark for Mr. Barr and Mr. Jellicoe to notice by the time they arrived.

Fishhead

It may sound odd, but a large cemetary can reflect the optimism of the living. The spacious graveyard and the church beside it, with substantial spire, belong to a time that was to be without end.

Outlaw

What Hoot Rawley talked about was the time before we were revisions of ourselves. The late afternoon was unblemished. Heat rose from the heaps of stone beneath us. Willows spotted the base of the gully.

Eleven Beds

Night on Lake Dallas in the Texas summer: the water gives back the starlight and his girlfriend is fifteen years old, freckled, and they await the magic of the moonrise.

This Company Died for Your Lawn, This Lawn Died for Your Company

Sligo’s new idea was wealth, sudden gouts of cashola, the vaguely cheese-like scent of new bills. He viewed our current circumstance–technically, a circumstance of poverty–as the ideal substrate.

The Bunt

Standing at the plate, fouling off a pitch, I’m trying to give a place and a name to this lanceur. I remeber vaguely that I failed him in the course I used to call “English for Intermediate Morons” before I realized that teaching English in France was no laughing matter.

Skin

Anders chucked everything–wife, friends back home, even his grown kids after they’d helped him straighten out his complicated international paperwork–to marry an Egyptian woman, a registrar at the exclusive international prep school he worked for in Cairo.

Don’t Call It Christmas

When he got home that night is was raining hard, and the girl lay in the entryway, crying. The boy was gone, but his chrome bike still stood against the wall. The girl glanced up from her dirty yellow blanket, eyes red, cheeks dark with mascara.

You Just Sit Here, Little Daddy

“Maybe you should move in with a man,” Derrick told his daughter Polly over the phone. She was having trouble with roommates. “There might be less intensity.”

A Brief History of the Flood

I’m ankle-deep in water, wearing Dad’s new rubber duck boots. Mom’s lying alone in their bed, blanket up to her ears. “Mom,” I say, “there are nine reasons you shouldn’t commit suicide. Number one: It’ll mean you’re a quitter. Number two: Dad will have won.”

Open Spaces

I got disoriented on the prairie. Most of the roads were gravel, and only a few had signs. Nobody up there needed them. Tourists usually stuck to the interstate on their way up to Grangeville or down to the Lewiston …

Fire-Eater

Ellen Morgan drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, keeping them light, not gripping the hot vinyl because the very act of expressing the tension that this endless traffic generated in her would only augment it. All cities had traffic, …

Orleanas and Roam

It feels right naming people for what they are—brigands, some of them, pussies, most of them—even though I sometimes get my ass whipped for naming people after things when I don’t quite know what they are. Johnjohn is my best …

Motherland

[This text is also available online as part of our TextBox anthology.]   Tokyo, 1979 Etsuko Nagatomi loved all three of her children, but she did not love them all the same. Being a mother had taught her that this …

Rationing

SABURO’S FATHER belonged to that generation which, having survived the war, rebuilt Japan from ashes, distilling defeat and loss into a single-minded focus with which they erected cities and industries and personal lives. Reflecting on this as an adult, Saburo …

Two Words

ROY GOT UP AT FIVE to start cooking for the firemen. He had been getting up at dawn for weeks now anyway, ever since the last seizure, but usually he just read his affirmations and practiced tai chi in front …

Naked Man

We are nothing alike. If my mother had had a coffee-colored baby with nappy hair after she went off with Clay Dixon, that child would look more like her than I do. Now, of course, she has the sagging cheeks, the giving-way at the jaw line. At the airport, any of the old women getting off the plane could have convinced me they were her.

First Person

“The first step he took was his first step toward the penitentiary,” Pam liked to joke about her son, Avery, during the year that she and Avery lived next door to me in Sea Coast Villiage, which sounds like a prettier place than it was. It was a strip of poverty down in the Florida Panhandle near the ocean, shortly before that part of the coastline was developed.

Nine Worthy and the Best That Ever Were

That there lived a man named Israel Schelde, there can be no dispute. There is the reflex hammer with the reddish rubber tomahawk head bearing his initials. There is the re shirt, thick and coarse like Indian just, with black buttons, that Israel was known to wear as a coat and in which he appears in many photographs. And in many other places there are many other things, and many people will give accounts of him.

Wishbones

Our father always called my mother Bean. She was slender and crisp. Now her cheeks sank in darkened hollows. Her nose was a pointy beak. I found her on the front porch, looking off toward the mountain. She flinched when I came up on her; then her arms trembled and one leg quivered in a little burst as if she had a chill.

Rat Choice

Lately Lisa’s mother had been telling her things she does not want to know. Lisa’s mother, who has told her little, now will not shut up. She follows Lisa to the car, under starlight, to tell her that Lisa’s father has been impotent for years.

The Separatists

The enthusiasts had planned to hold their Eight Annual Dinner Dance at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Kamilelaa, but the Kamilelaas were divorced in March, and Mrs. K., who kept the house, refused to host a party to which her husband would have to be invited.

The After Man

It will sound dead on like an infomercial when I confess the truth. That is because at the beginning — no, for ten years before the real start, when I actually dwindled — the cable hucksters spoke to me at all hours in their baby lisps and daddy nostrums and lover landishments until the world split into food and joy and I chose joy.

Drowned Edward Tug

Summer, 1904

Edward Tug was nobody special to Step Hall, especially now that he was a dead man. Step waited on shore while Fred Titus and Elmo pulled the body onto the grass and laid him next to the half-submerged boat they’d found drifting among the cypress stumps that morning. Edward Tug himself was washed into the cypress cove and come to rest against a broken branch dragging in the water.

Moon Over My Mountain

The blanket Ina lay on was wool, a scratchy, yellow-gold cloth like her coat. Rich women wore fur coats, she knew. She didn’t know what rich people’s blankets were made of. Ina took a few minutes a day to stretch out and rest. Dinner would be easy, canned salmon and soupy potatoes, rough mashed with extra water, a family favorite. There was no need to get up just yet.

Old Friend

The week before I got out of Gamblers’ Rehab Ranch, my wife, Katie, left me, closed our bank account and took a waitress job in Bullhead City; the day after I got home from the ranch, my father moved in with me. I don’t know if this is a coincidence, but it was also right about that time that I started hearing voices from the poker room.

Alice in Dairyland

When the phone rang, I was in bed inder the covers, trying to stay warm. As I ran to answer, I saw that it was snowing again. I’d been in Wisconson, America’s frozen dairy land, nearly six years, so I should have been used to it, but I was a Florida girl at heart, and each took me by suprise. “Alice Anne?” a voice said. My name came out slurred, like it was Allison.

Male of the Species

Threats where coming from everywhere–voices on the answering machine, vicious notes under the car wipers. There was a brick on the bathroom floor, shards of glass from the broken window and a sheet of paper creased under a rubber band. Bern in Hell! was scribbled in purple chalk on our front steps

Father White in the Torrid Zone

One by one the lepers’ tongues slithered fot the Host. Father Lawrence White looked down upon the surfacing faces–one without a nose, one without ears, one with a whorled cavity in the cheek. He raised each wafer with an austere flourish, brought it near the supplicant’s tongue and then, like a deft croupier, tossed it in.

I Have Lost My Rights

When we heard the horse we moved from the firelight by the ivied oak where we’d been bivouacked and stood to our mounts. It was coming right at us. Pistol aimed at the snapping brush, I called out a challenge. Virg was crouched beside me, his hackles stiff and fangs bared. Haemon Willis and Coates had their Sharps at the ready. Nobody was our friend; we couldn’t be too careful.

Hannigan’s Woods

In October he spent a good part of each day on the roof. In the mornings he’d go up there wrapped in an old army blanket with a thermos of coffee and sit at the edge, looking out at Lefreniere’s Island or at the Adirondacks across the bay. He’d remember the old days in the fall, his father taking them down the highway in the sky-blue Electra convertible, the top back and the mountains looming ahead like a great lidless box filled with a thousand crayon tips of red and orange and yellow.

Set a Trap

Leighton Shay Morkan’s negress Judith wanted to gossip about a local hanging, but she could not keep his attention. It was a scandal in a nearby town much bandied in the papers, and he was leery of talk about it. Sitting in the mudroom of his farmhouse in Galloway, Missouri, he dug two fingers through lime paste mixed in a spittoon. On a cedar bench knee-to-knee across from him sat his negro hand Isaac, tense as a hound.

Interpreters

The child is Thomas’, not his. She knows this, just as she knows it was Thomas she tempted, Thomas’ seed she wooed that first night in the house.

She had answered the last of the visitors’ questions at her door instead of leaving by way of the fields as the two of them usually did at closing. She had taken off her cap and let her hair flow down her back.

Most Likely to Succeed

Colin Huskey was absent due to illness more than any other student at Tyler High School. Four of his teachers had e-mailed his parents, a vice principal had telephoned twice, and, in a final and desperate bluff, the principal had summoned the family for a face-to-face meeting. Colin was scolded. He was begged. He was cajoled, importuned, and remonstrated with–to no avail. He always did at least enough work to pass, usually at the level of a C or D. He never disrupted classes, did not fight with other students, and remained, for the most part, as quiet as possible.

Seeing

It had been this way for over a month now, ever since that mid-July evening when Brenda, her feet comfortable in thick socks and cushiony white sneakers, her cotton shorts and pink T-shirt light and soft, had gone on her …

Melvin in the Sixth Grade

Maybe it was around the time that the Crips sliced up my brother’s arm for refusing to join their gang. Or it could have been after the Crips and the Bloods shot up the neighborhood one Halloween so we couldn’t go trick-or-treating. It could have even been when my brother’s friend Anthony got shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever the reason, my father decided it was tim to take advantage of a Veteran’s Loan, get out of L.A. and move to the suburbs. Even if I can’t quite nail down the events that spurred the move, I know that one and a half months after I climbed into my father’s rusted-out Buick Wildcat and said good-bye to 110th Street and hello to Verbugo Street, with its lawns and no sidewalks, I fell for my first man.

Tsunami

Violet began to notice that some of the things she could see out the car window looked a little odd. For instance, she saw a car lying upside down on the east side of the road. One of the doors was cracked open. This by itself would have been strange enough, something you don’t see every day, but after another mile or so, she saw another one.

Mister Henry’s Trousers

Hearing the Honda in the valley, he pushed himself to his feet, paused to let his belly receive the pain, then moved stiffly across the dirt yard to the wrought-iron gate. From there he watched the young white man drive the Honda through the stand of tamarind trees on the brow of the hill and bounce along the dusty trail toward him.

How to Become a Publicist

In the Midwestern town where I grew up, my father us repainting my room blue and white, my favorite colors, just in case I come home. I try not to think about this. Instead I concentrate on getting a job as an editorial assistant, not knowing any other work for a young graduate to do in publishing in New York.

Serenade

My mother believed that her entire life would have been somehow different had she been given piano lessons as a girl. She said this often, with a little sigh that made me feel I had better run through my scales one more time.

Eva’s Breasts

She opened a shopping bag and pulled out a doll’s arm and leg. She placed the plastic body parts on the desk, along with inflatable lips and a plaster cast of teeth the orthodontist had given her when she was thirteen. The last object she retrieved from her bag was a malleable breast she had stolen from her gynecologist’s office. The breast was a tool the doctor used to show patients how to conduct proper breast exams.

Of These Stones

Trip

Geek Player, Love Slayer

Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha

The Pleasure of Pears

Trainee Marissa Haynes Will Now Perform the Fear of Heights Test

Talk About Sex: An Orientation

All I’m going to do is talk. That’s right–you’re going to pay me to sit here and talk to you.

Why He Did It

Two hours after he exposed himself to her, the girl made a scene at supper. It was just what Wilder had hoped she’d do.

The Restaurant with the Glass Lamps

Excerpt:

They were suspended over the Ohio River. It was nighttime, and she couldn’t see the water. There was a blinking cell-phone tower on the opposite shore, and her lover was driving toward it.

Coney Island in Winter

Winner of the 1999 Editors’ Prize for Fiction THE FEELING OF MY FAT on me—and wanting to get rid of it. Seeking to sell it, get something for my fat. Fat sells. My mother’s fat I inherited, her swaddling hips, …

Things That Make Your Heart Beat Faster

If I was a painter this is how I would paint the Napa Valley: not like those gallery scenes of mustard in bloom or harvest-ripe fruit, but this ghostly silver secret landscape, the vines dormant and white with frost, the moon full, jackrabits scattering across the roadway before me like mercury beads.

The Chosen

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Grasp Special Comb

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Music of the Inner Lakes

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The Largest Room

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Tad Lincoln’s Ladder of Dreams

Winner of 1999 Editors’ Prize in Fiction Emily Pease. This entire sotry is not currently available online.

The End of Those Things

In Faculty Block Number Five

The Woman Who Said No

The Intentional Deception

Love

The Chair

Tour Europa

The Widow

Rebucca Tull her name was when she moved here. She was the daughter of a preacher from the Shenandoah Valley, from a town and a church more refined than what she had to face on this back-of-beyond North Carolina mountain. I was about eleven or twelve. I was at the house-raising for the family, which was just Rebecca, her Virginia preacher father, and her mother.

A Doctor’s Story

Dr. Buchner sits on a white bench in a well-kept garden in the town of Dimmsdorf, on the grounds of the nursing home where he has lived for the past four years, since the heart attack that nearly killed him in 1980.

Up on the Yuba

He kept to himself on the ferry, going up the Sacramento from San Francisco. A lot of the other men on board had partners or were striking up friendships. He’d volunteered his name and home state, Hy Hopgoode, Iowa, to a couple of men from Florida who sat next to him on the top deck, but he let it drop after that. He didn’t mention that he’d been here in California before. When the ferry docked the next day at Sacramento City, most of the passengers headed toward the outfitters for supplies, buying so much it seemed they were expecting the diggings to be right at hand, like they’d only have to carry their heavy packs a couple of miles. He knew better but still overloaded himself with food and equipment before heading up the road.

On the Sea (A Sailor’s Story)

I could only see the dim lights of the harbor we had just left, and the black sky above us, darker than pitch. A cold wind was blowing in the dark sky above; it was about to rain. We felt suffocated, despite the wind and the cold. By “we” I mean we sailors who stood in the hold.

The Equinox Wrapper

Sir:

I was there at the death of your dead boy Clinch and though I did not see his killing, me and your dead boy killed for 2 days here in Nth Georgia, but your Clinch lived only 1 and 1 half days of it, him denouncing the while till he met his end.

Homecoming

Even after the night of gunfire and cannon, of surging, drunken crowds on Market and Water Streets, all down the river front; after flares and rockets; even after the box-shaped gunboat finished thumping bursts of fire and black mounds of smoke, men still staggered under the Weitzers’ window and paused at the visage of the brown Mississippi River.

Peninsula

The house creaked and the flames of the Advent candles danced in the draft from a gale wind coming off the bay. Two days before Christmas and they were at dinner, Ellen serving, Mother and Papa, Uncle Pete and Aunt Daria and Jan herself, sitting across from the promising Mr. Ted Phillips, one of Papa’s engineers. His flight home had been postponed due to the weather, and Papa had asked him to dinner.

West

When the bus first carried Tina and her mother into the desert, past the oil fields of west Texas, Tina felt somehow that they had passed a point of no return. The land itself became sinister, barren even of oil …

Steal Away

Benny Padilla wasn’t Marty’s first one. The first one was a big-toothed boy with fingers like sausages he pistoned inside her until both of them fell away aching. This on the afternoon couch in the boy’s living room, the parents at work. Marty not at her dance lessons and not expected home until dinner.

To Love Big Dog

YOU ARE NOT JUST ONE of the girls. Wait until your senior year in high school, when you know about love, to fall for Mr. Brinkly like the other girls. The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception High School is something …

A Night Different From All Other Nights

The day before, Hannah Vredenburg and her younger brother Tobias watched their father let his partner’s pigeons go, back to their home in Antwerp. One by one, wafting between each for safety, he released them from the attic coop when …

The Mind of God

It has never occurred to me to say no to The Numbers; they chose me, and I’ve accepted them. Totally. Now, almost every afternoon when I come home from my office in the city, they let me know in advance precisely how many automobiles will drive past me during my short descent down the hill to the little lane where I turn left and finish my walk home.

Happy Dust

In the twentieth century I believe there are no saints left, but our farm on Boght Road had not yet entered the twentieth century. At that time, around 1908 it would be, I had a secret I could tell to no one, least of all a saint or an arsenic eater.

The Talking Cure

Love is unspeakable. Consider the story of the older brother who went off to school, the brilliant, tall mother and wife who hunched herself shorter, curved at her tilted drafting table as if around the buildings she planned for her …

In Loco Parentis

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Whammy

This story is not currently available online.

Having Anne

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Smoking is Cool

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The Hairy Little Girl

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Casting a Circle

“Wasn’t Phillip the guy you said I would like?” I didn’t have time to answer this. It was late, the bus was electric and stealthy, and Genevieve’s pupils were malfunctioning. She was walking ahead to keep out of Philip’s hearing, …

Distant Lights in the Foothills Beyond Owari-Eki

20:42 The emergency call from Central comes over the line at 20:42, but Matsuda has already decelerated the train. He often reacts faster than the automated shutdown system. Central tells the motorman the tracks have become obstructed ahead at Katsubo …

Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues

I heard a whippoorwill last night, the old man said.

Say you did? Rabon asked without interest. Rabon was just in from his schoolteaching job. He seated himself in the armchair across from the bed and hitched un his trouser legs and glanced covertly at his watch. The old man figured Rabon would put in his obligatory five minutes then go in his room and turn the stereo on.

Monastic Ruins

August 25 Dear Mairead: I’m writing to say that I made it and I would like to go forward with our tentative agreement, that is, that I will live here for twenty pounds a month in exchange for repairs on …

Mortimer of the Maghreb

CHARLES MORTIMER WATCHED the rippled brown land wheel back to horizontal. He drained the last drops from the plastic glass of Johnny Walker the air steward had given him, and decided: that’s it, no more booze for a week. Au …

Ordinary Apples

ASK SOMEONE HOW EVE tempted Adam, and the answer will likely be apple. But the Book of Genesis says only that Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree. Some biblical scholars believe it was an apricot. I feel …

Sentinel

Across the river the chef de poste turns up his boom box, and frantic and repetitive music crosses the water. A noise to shatter the serenity of the tropical evening, except we’re already plenty agitated, all of us: the insects …

Wizard

You could tell the Players Theater in Eugene had been a glamorous place in its prime, maybe back in the thirties—the chandeliers still spun in the lobby, and the big ornate balcony still swept across the back of the hall, …

The Solitary Twin

This story is no currently available online. One Saturday morning when my brother and I were ten, our family television set spontaneously combusted.

Her New Last Name

This story is not currently available online. Nell sleeps with her hand on her mother’s breast until Mrs. Pope comes in, carrying chickens to pluck.  Nell is put outside.  She hears the door close behind her, and feels the wind …

Flame

This story is not currently available online. A letter was lying on Nimei’s desk.  She was puzzled because the envelope did not give a return address.  The postmark showed the letter from Harbin, but she knew nobody in that city.

The Rememberer

[This text is also available online as part of our TextBox anthology.]   MY LOVER IS experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don’t know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next …

Underground Music

This story is not currently available online. On weekday mornings in Madrid any number of musicos go down into the Metro to play.  Toni Valero plays the guitar at the Velazquez station.  Marcos Medina plays the recorder at La Latina.

Bactine

This story is not currently available. It was her skin that she loved the most.  It was clear, even-toned, dewy!  She would stroke it, knead it, pull a pinch away from her face and let it snap back; With Oil of …

That Lamoka Lake Feeling

This story is not currently available online. My mother carried huge pocketbooks with everything in the world in them but money.  When she got a new pocketbook it was a bright new day, cleared up for ship sightings.  The old …

The Windmill

This story is not currently available online. The trough in the landscape was what fooled you–made the windmill appear to lie just over a hill, when the real distance might be miles.  Jess pushed for it still.  You’d just dip …

Pain

I’m starting her story here because of her attachment to looking into things, her penchant for gazing into closed-off spaces.   The MRI sections of her pelvis—a panel of pictures with diverse views—were hung on the light box in my …

Tulsa Snow

She said, “You have no character. I see right through you.” She leaned across the table, closer to me, her eyes glittering a little, as if she had just told me I was cute. I tried hard to appear amused. …

The Rest of Her Life

This story is not currently available online. The dog was a mixture of god-knows-how-many breeds, but the vet had told them he had at least some rottweiler blood.  You could see it in his shoulders, and you could hear it …

E-Z-Roll

Just now, Farris is in the computer room showing off a glamour shot of his daughter. She looks like an ad for an escort service, a ponderous wonderbra-ed decolletage welling up around her feather boa. There is a stamped foil signature in one corner of the picture. She is thirteen, and Farris is a proud papa.

Krishna’s Kid Ivory

The full text of this story is not currently available online.

Butterfly’s Cutlass Supreme

When I was fourteen I got burned in a drug deal by a guy named Butterfly and when I went back to take care of it, one thing led to another and I ended up in jail.

Digby Fair

Danielle came up to me at the school and told me she had $87,000 in the bank and that she had dual citizenship, American and Canadian. This was at her high school in Nova Scotia, near where they’d recently filmed The Scarlet Letter. People were pretty proud of that, so I didn’t say that it had been a dog in the States, a real snoozer.

I Do Believe in Ghosts, I Do, I Do, I Do

Honestly, I do. No, actually, I don’t. Well, I”m not really sure anymore. There was a time when I was completely sure about these things. That’s when I walked into the old RKO building on the Paramount lot and got my first Hollywood job.

The Oboist

My apartment sits above a liquor store in a questionable part of town. I delight in telling this because it suggests a degree of daring, a worldliness I cannot claim, as though I keep a Harley out back or red shoes in my closet. I fantasize that I will one day be as fascinating as my apartment, but this is unlikely.

Two Cars in a Cornfield

There were eight of us, and we all worked hard in our high school classes, played on the same teams and kept things normal with outsiders, including our parents, so our secret stayed intact.

The Last Time I Saw Richard

They were irresistable, each in her own way, each in her middle thirties, counting down, each with deep, untapped maternal stores. In fact, they were too maternal to make good lovers; or maybe he was too . . . something. Oedipal? Sensitive? Accustomed to raunchy approach?

Ray Sips a Low Quitter

It’s bar day minus 4, early afternoon. Elise stands in the bathroom, vomiting. Afterwards she washes her face, brushes her teeth and walks, resting one hand against the wall, back into the den where she’s studying with Daren. Under her feet, the carpet feels rougher than usual.

Careful

When Patty sees Garrett in his new swim trunks, her heart springs up like a cobra.

It’s not just his extreme thinness and whiteness, as if he’s been somebody’s prisoner. It’s also the scars. Though not large, they are plentiful, scattered across his back and chest and legs, some pale and reserved, others rosy with youth.

Family History

It was Ellen who had insisted on taking the dog to a new doctor, one who specialized in canine personality disorders. A shrink for dogs, Gil thought. “What’s the matter with the vet?” he had asked her.

Another Life

“Who’s this?” said Stella, settling gracefully on the sofa beside him. “Who’s who?” Frank asked. Plucked suddenly from his book, he refocused on the parcel afloat in the silk swirls of her lap.

Chop Money

The Harmattan came early. Already, in the first week of November, the cold wind from the Sahara swept down through a thousand miles of cracked mud and barren creekbeds and brought a fine foggy dust to settle over glasses and crockery and clothes hung out to dry and anyone who didn’t move often enough.

The Green Suit

Once upon a time — September of 1976, to be exact — I went to New York. I was twenty-three. I had a diploma from a college in the hills of eastern Tennessee, a school that until my junior year had not admitted women.

The Twelve Plagues

When the phone rang, Rosenthal was kicking a canvas to shreds in the middle of his studio. He’d already thrown a can of wet brushes against the far wall and had kicked a tray of paint across the room, leaving an attractive boat-shaped smear of burnt sienna sailing along the whitewashed floorboards. The place should have been condemned, and so should Rosenthal: trapped inside another night of failure in a season of failure, locked in a listless, drifting orbit around a failing sun.

Swimming In The Dark

Life is strange, isn’t it? A hotel pool in Rome, the china plate of blue water, fifteen other girls in the company-issue swimsuit. We’re stewardesses from Japan. Yesterday we went shopping. Tomorrow, Singapore.

Life With The Easter Bunny

The first person to answer our ad wasn’t suitable at all. Under “last residence” on the form we made up for these prospective roommates she put down a place with “Manor” in its name, and during the interview Mother seemed airily indulgent, almost humoring. She didn’t even take any notes, which told me the woman had no chance.

Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed

This is a bit of a puzzle, really. A certain thrashing about overhead. Swimmers with nowhere to go, I fear, though I don’t recognize this body of water. I’ve grown quite used to this existence I now have. I’m fully conscious that I’m dead. And yet not so, somehow. I drift and drift, and I am that in which I drift, though what that is now, precisely, is unclear to me.

When We Were Wolves

An Oregon boot was a heavy iron cuff with an iron brace that ran down your ankle and under your arch. The idea of course was to discourage migration. It was invented by some crackpot warden at Salem with too much free time on his hands. We had Oregon boots in Wyoming in 1949, and walking in them was like walking across the exercise yard in ice skates. We did that too.

Beiderman and the Hard Words

Aug. 2. An over-heated wind all day, and the dust that rides on it, not simple dust but dirt itself, the earth itself. The rags Ma stuffs in door and window sill hold back only some; and grit n her kitchen, on the oilcloth, pots, in the water-pail, a skin of it everywhere, near gives her fits. With grit in our teeth, we spit black.

Captains By Default

The snow is delicate and knee high. It is cotton candy in my mouth, too fleeting to satisfy but enjoyable just the same. I bend in mid stride and shovel the powder with my gloved hand. With this motion I leave a smooth and straight gully that strikes me as the most perfect consequence of my effort, conspicuous in its complete lack of fault. I pack the snow against the roof of my mouth and suck it of its moisture. The remains trickle down my throat.

Why Richard Can’t

There were endless good reasons. For months now, Richard had lain in bed running over the list in his head, adding to it as though the reasons were dollars and he was wisely depositing them in a savings account.

Serenissima

They had literally been planning this trip for years, Shana had longed to see Italy since she was a girl and they were supposed to have gone in 1952, for their honeymoon. But they’d had no money at all and the war devastation still lay across Europe like a smoking blanket and so it was put off, though with the absolute promise to one another that they’d go as soon as they possibly could, certainly before they had a child. However, Amy, unplanned and unexpected, was born less than a year later, and the trip was of course out of the question while she was still toddling about. Besides, Perry had just started his new job with Boeing, and how could they think about giving up the money when other young couples they knew were struggling so?

You Think I Care

Annie sees the man before he sees her. She’s on her way to Eric’s. A four-point-seven-mile walk. Her mom and dad, as she was leaving, stopped their Saturday-in-November yardwork and gave her the ritual I-spy. She had Marlboros in her pocket and a joint snuggled in her sock, but there were leaves to rake and chrysanthemums to pinch, and her mom and dad are never quite so KGB in daylight, and today, especially, you could tell they wanted to trust her — it’s the kind of red-cheeked, blue-sky autumn day that makes them want to believe in their daughter’s goodness. In the end, they let her go with just a “Be home in time for dinner,” and “Be careful on Lawton Pond Road.” Annie nobbed. Whatever. She’s fifteen and in love, and today’s the day she and Eric are going to do it.

Watertables

“She come out of the beanfield,” he says talking fast. His lips are pasty from sleep and they stick together as he talks. I bend to look under the bed. “She says they put her in there after her husband died. It’s awful in there.” He points again out the window.

Box Seats

The Girl’s Book of Math

How You Are Born

Miranda Lambert’s bedroom was on the third floor of the family’s manor house, overlooking the sweep of the back lawn, the reflecting pool, the twin gazebos and the rose garden. During the winter the view was not remarkable; mist obscured …

Boys

Easter

The silver and black Lakenvelder was the best. A rooster shiny like marble, a purple ribbon winner if I ever saw one. Big. He could kick a hole in my jeans with his fifth toe, sharp like a diamond.

Homage

It is late spring, and the leaves of the tobacco plants are beginning to yellow from their tips inward. William Noble stands in his tobacco field and stares across the road at Mincy Jones’ property. He is trying to understand why Mincy won’t give him the hay that he has earned.

Sid Badloss Sings “The Malignant Wandering Spirit of Darkness”

Here is Sylvia, in the audience again. She’s hunkered down on the rec-center astroturf, surrounded by kids, but none of them are hers.

I play guitar and sing “The Squeak Squeak song,” Squeak up! goes the refrain, Squeak now or forever hold your peace! Cute.

Last Dance

On the island I practiced winding, fashioning a slick, tight neurological cocoon around my interior ferment — the usual stuff: guilt, anger and, especially, fear. Not perfect, but God knows it worked, and I presented a seamlessness and continued to fly missions.

Downhillers

We arrived in Durango a day late, our bodies creaky after fourteen hours on a bus.

I slept most of the trip, but Kansas was antsy. He tapped his feet, played drums on his knees, went to the bathroom twice an hour, chatted up the bus driver so much that the guy told him to go back to his seat.

B. Horror

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Andy Andy and the Wolfman

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The Unemployed

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Dressing it Up

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The Rules of the Lake

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The Incredible Appearing Man

I let myself watch his walk to the truck, gravel scattering under his boots. He looks improbably young, a gypsy cowboy with shiny black curls bouncing around his hat. Was there a streak of gray or not? His jeans are tight. When he reaches the truck, he looks back at me. One, two, three, I count and shut the door. Three is as long as I can look without looking too long. My hands are shaking. Nothing happened, I tell myself. But my hands are shaking, and there’s no denying it.

A Long Sunday

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A Night at the Y

Fredonia

The Order of Things

The Byerson Test

Strays

Roan

For Tio, the worst part about burying horses is having to quarter them, to cut them up so thay fit in the hole. That’s what gets to him most, even more than the shock and disappointment of finding them dead.

All Summer Long

Your grandmother can’t stand the lobster smell stinking up the curtains and furniture and clothes so your uncle Eddie boils the lobsters outside. Eddie enjoys the job.

This Town Won’t Be in the United States

On the morning of August 10, 1861, miners at the Morkan Quarry heard thunder. They stepped from the shade of a tool shed and gazed west. Lime powdered them white and matted their hair gray with sweat.

Someone Like Jane

Ellen Gladney, starched an jewel-bedecked, swooped suddenly upon Delia and Katy, who were mopping up spilled punch.

Homesick: A Play in Two Scenes

LIGHTS UP. A young woman wrapped loosely in a coarse stained blanket, bare-legged, wearing only bloodstained pink wool socks on her feet, speaks.

Dispatch

When the call came Jeff had been in the last hours of his shift, damning the thick, recycled air in the control booth.

The Last Time My Uncle Came to Visit

I pick my uncle up from the bus station. He’s chain-smoking as usual so I tell him not to use the ashtrays — my mother likes to keep the car nice. He rolls down the window and flicks ashes from time to time. It’s a cool evening.

Settled on the Cranberry Coast

Our lives in this town are slowly improving. When Trudi grew up, in the old reservation houses, the roads were dirt and the crab factory still wheezed along, ugly and reeking. In early summer the factory stayed open all night, and the damp dirty smell of the crab cooking in its steel vats blew off the ocean, all the way to Aberdeen, even beyond, for all I knew.

The Province of the Bearded Fathers

On a bench in the sun at the side of a playground in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Willow is tall, but heavyset, and her real name is Esther; she changed it way back in college and has felt silly about it almost ever since, but still secretly likes the sound.

Guns

When Henry Teeter first arrived in Santa Monica the only thing he wanted to do was sit on the seawall at the very end of Wilshire Boulevard and watch the sunset. At several times during his pilgrimage he thought he might never get to the West Coast, and so, once there, was content merely to sit quietry for a time. After seven days of heading due west from North Carolina he had truned south at Needles on the advice of a filling station attendant who thought that Henry’s old Chevrolet might have an easier go of it approaching the Pacific coast from the southeast.

The Behavior of the Hawkweeds

For thirty years, until he retired, my husband stood each fall in front of his sophomore genetics class and passed out copies of Gregor Mendel’s famous paper on the hybridization of edible peas.

The Sea of Dames

Van Cleuve usually got the best women. It was a given. It started when he and Harry Durance and I were classmates at West Point. Harry and I would meet our Brooklyn or Bronx girls at Penn Station, but Van Cleave would usually vanish for a while and show up later with some pale blonde who you could just smell the money on. Some girl that would fix her icy blues on the view outside the cab window just so, and ride all insulated by her nickname and good fur.

Service, Servic, Servi

We were just getting nouveau, “nuevo,” Marguerita called it when the boxes arrived. Silver and crystal, mink jackets to summer in storage, chandeliers, and there were french doors to be hung. “Das ist zu reich,” squealed Irma when the Oriental was unrolled. Here are the Wedgwood bowls, a security system, a marble-floored foyer where children sprawl playing jacks. Here is Graciela carrying a laundry basket saying something that sounds like a Spanish curse or a Spanish prayer.

Loosestrife

From work I usually go straight home to feed the cubs, who’ve come to depend on me for dinner, which isn’t necessarily healthy but has its gratifying aspects–for all of us, I think. But this had been one fo those days of taking too many people on nature hikes around the island, pointing out the fragile clouds of diesel exhaust–in short, wondering what good i was doing–so it was somethign more than a whim that prompted me to stop at Bark bay on my way home and see about the purple loosestrife I’d spotted growind there.

Blue Boy

The summer he was seventeen, Kenny was given a job as a lifeguard at a leafy, brick-and-ivy racquet club, in the money belt just beyond the city limits. Rising at six every morning, he would usually find his father asleep on the sofa, mornign new or exercise on the television, a last, unfinished high ball on floor beside him. Covering his father with a lavender chenille bedspread, a bedspread decorated with little lines and popcorn balls of cotton, Kenny would eat his cornflakes at the coffee table, watching television. It was just the two of them that summer.

Arroyo

When I heard Dinah crowing, I got up and dressed in the dark. Pa Jopa was snoring and Brice was grinding his teeth, and from the kitchen it sounded like one person whistling and walking backa nd forth int he gravel outside. I cut two peices of bread, wrapped them in a dish towel, and put them in my pocket. The rest i left on the table where Brice and Pa Jopa could find it, and then I went out to the barn.

Selwyn on Winged Feet

February 29

I tried to tell Mildred about the cemetery today, but as soon as I started on the business at Father’s grave–I hadn’t even gotten to what happened at Walter’s–she put me off: “Oh, please.”

“But let me tell you about Wal–”

“Stop it!” she clapped her hands to her ears. “You and your relentless imagination! It’s driving me crazy!”

Well, I’m sorry for that, but it’s keeping me sane.

They Whisper

Mail

My mother calls me from Old Town,Maine at eight in the morning, an hour into my writing time. “You sound grumpy, Katinka,” she says. “Did I interrupt something?”

“Just my work,” I groan.

“As long as it’s just your work,” she says.

It’s her social whirl voice, her social work voice. Send this girl to the prom. I sigh. It’s my own fault. I brough a silencer. But what if a publisher wants to ring me up? I turn off my computer.

Normandy

For all the effort he made to be calm and detached, to be amused at his own foolish tension, the unlikely prospect taht he would feel grief after all these years for a man he had never known, Sonny did not feel like himself at all when he climbed out of the rental car inf ront of the open gates of the cemetery.

The Crying House

“The house is crying,” I said to her as steam ran down the walls. The cooking stove heated the house. Windows were frozen over with white feathers and ferns. It was a long week of cooking, and there was no music.

Pale Morning Dun

That evening we crawled under the fence and looked at the house where old man Fario had died. Wooden slats were nailed over the windows and the front door was padlocked. The grass was brown like the weeds along the road. Some of the branches were dead on the willow tree.

Someone Will Love You

I use the ultra fine needles, so thin I have to hold them to the light to see them. They dont’ draw blood and they don’t leave scars. My girls don’tw ant scars. Even if I have to zap the same hair five times, I still use the ultra fine needles.

Coup de Sexe

The afternoon was appropriate for a clandestine mission, the sky obliterated by a vast grey cloud, farmyards empty, not an animal or a child at play to be seen. A bleak afternoon indeed when one failed to see even a nosey babushka on a stoop with a broom in hand pretending to sweep while gathering gossip for a meeting of crones at tomorrow morning’s church service, or with hands folded upon their chests.

Light Sweet Crude

In January it never rains in Rio Jesus, so the storm had everybody edgy. Randall would later swear his restlessness was inspired, a shiver to a nailscratch by God. For days he’d worked without success reconfiguring the dish to try to capture some reception, from somewhere. Why should he want to go up again now and look at the blank visage of the antique 25 incher lashed to the rafters of the community shelter? It was getting dark fast and for no good reason he wandered out in the rain. Then he saw it at the head of the path, a weird light pulsing faintly in the gloaming. He quickened his step. At the shelter the light was playing on the walls of rain that poured off the tin roof. It danced on the glossy white hood of the Isuzu on blocks in a corner. It illuminated a lamb tethered to a post and an iguana behind the lamb. The lamb stared back in wonder. The iguana closed its eyes. The high pitched, curiously emphatic voice strained for an audience, but there were only the animals and now Randall wandering up. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” said the familiar voice. Soon, across a screen that blinked and leapt with distant lightning, there were charts with planes, bombs, targets. Holy shit, Randall whispered. He began to holler. Pam. LaDawn. Mom and Pop. Get a load of this.

Bill of Sale

Foster glumly surveyed the wreckage of the Sloanes co-op. As architect for the renovation of their East Side “dream” home, it was he who was accountable, though not responsible, for the current state of disaster. Electrical cables sprouted from uncovered junction boxes, lights dangled lopsidedly from the ceiling, scratches and gouges adorned previously unblemished walls. Beside the entertainment unit a new hole filled with capellini-thin wire had somehow appeared overnight; Foster had no idea what it was for. He made a note on his clipboard to ask Ron what Earl Sloane was up to now.

Hema, My Hema

Hema, my beautiful Hema, is determined tonight. I know it the minute I crawled into our home. I don’t mean “crawled” in a figurative sense. It accurately describes what I did. Our house, you see, is a little on the cozy side; six by six feet to be exact. A perfect little cube it is, made of tin cans that my Hema’s late hubbie took apart and flattened into sheets. The result has been quite colorful–white Amul milk powder sheets next to yellow Dalda tin sheets, next to rose-red and aquamarine-blue Asian Paints sheets. Of course, rust, like a leprosy of tin, has eaten away most of the color, and the Jai Sena have scrawled their fascist slogans in black paint all across our walls.

Unwelcome Gods

When I heard that the mighty Finn Weller was dying of cancer in Alabama, I decided to forget the past fifteen years. I’d go pay him a visit, one last time. I wouldn’t even let him know I was coming. The decision wasn’t too tough to make. I had been living on full disability for a long time outside of Bolivar, Tennessee. I didn’t have a family or do much of anything, so I had plenty of money saved up. I could pay for a bus trip to go see an old war buddy, a guy who I figure kept me alive over there.

Buddy’s Best Work

Three swans dropped dead this week and this morning there was a fourth on the street out front. Nobody knows why. Maybe they are choking to death, maybe it is a sign from God. At first I thought it was a big pile of newspapers just starting to blow away but when I got closer I saw it was a swan with one wing spread out on the road as if it had tried to lift itself up. Poor thing. Already ants were in its eyes. I called Buddy to come quickly I was so upset. I did not know what it might mean right in front of our house and the baby due in three weeks. Buddy said all it meant was that he had to pick it up which he tried to do but the body kept slipping out between the wings, it was hard to get a purchase. Finally he dragged it up on the lawn. I said I’d call the ASPCA, but Buddy shook his head. “Virginia,” he said. “It’s as dead as a doornail.”

Birdie

First day of practice my senior year, I walk out of the locker room and see what looks like a sixth-grade white dude whooshing in a jumper from way past the free throw line.

Back in Town

Before I drive the wagon into town, my wife makes me promise that I will not go into the saloon where No-Nose Ed and the other bad men hang out.

That One Particular Game

In the summer of 1974, my father rewarded me for graduating from sixth grade by giving me to my mother. He and his new girlfriend — a woman whose age could be derived, I’d determined, by substracting my age from my father’s — were bound for the Virgin Islands. When on the day of their departure I impetuously inquired, “Why Virgin Islands?” Linda giggled and said, “Honey, you got me!”

The Invisible

The man craned his large head over the salads in the glass display case — potato, macaroni, lettuce-cucumber — while Orchard was making his pastrami sandwich. She was aware of him — something odd. He was smallish, maybe in his early thirties, curly hair, blue eyes fairly intense. She had noticed him a couple of days earler, too

Seeing Things

It is the terrible summer we all go crazy. Uncle peach has offed himself and I now sleep in my clothes. Maybe we hardly knew him, but his blood runs in our veins. There is lunacy in this family and I feel too peculiar in my floaty nightgown. I know I am a child, but I am a tall child, and children can go crazy too.

Epilogue

What am I to say about two brothers whose wives have argued, who are thus forced by their immediate loyalties not to speak to one another? Or the surgeon in love with the deftness of his hands, the choreography of his fingers, and who has been forced by illness to set his scalpel aside? Or the woman who refuses to act on her own desires because she is attracted to a married man, one who represents moral integrity and uprightness of heart? What can I do but repeat the usual cliches: that life is indeed a garden of pain, that men and women are born for trouble and heartache. That the world which seems to lie before us like a land so various, so beautiful, so new, etc., etc., is in reality a smoking landfill?

Pap’s Story

Once upon a time the old man — I say old man but he’s a boy at heart — that old man went down to the river near his place to play at ducks and drakes. I said river but it was more like a stream, unless there was a flood and how often does that happen these days, anyhow?

Route Coyote

I sat in the recliner watching the video tape from last Thanksgiving as my brother Sean taped me. It was Thanksgiving. There aren’t many older brothers on this planet like Sean who would let a kid brother do something like this, even after the coyote thing in 1987. I love him and everyone in the family. On the video, I saw myself sit in the same recliner watching a video from the previous Thanksgiving. I’ve been doing this every year since 1985. It’s a Thanksgiving ritual I do, a personal and now a family thing

Those Who Can’t

Despite himself, L’Quintis continues teaching English at the St. Michael’s School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. For the most part he likes the place, though the students often look at him funny when he asks them to not cut in line. During his nine-year tenure he has taught a total of 548 kids the gospel according to Emerson, Rilke, and Huckleberry Finn.

Waiter

I’ve been turning them away all night. This time, three shapely girls shake tigh-skirted hips and fix me with brightening eyes, anything to get past the sliding glass door separating this raucous bar crowd from the ambassador Room. Beyond the Ambassador Room, a portrait-lined hallway leads to the Dining Entrance as well as the clean, marbled privacy of the exclusive rest rooms. It’s the rest rooms they want. This side of the dorr, the ladies room downstairs is a thirty minute wait, fifteen for the gents.

Fever

On David Wheelock’s front walk, beside his sagging sago palm, was someone who made him feel a little dizzy. She had rung his doorbell some minutes before. Now she was leaving “Hello,” he called out.

“Dr. Wheelock,” she said, turning rapidly. “It’s me!”

Babyman

I did time at Fairhope Men’s Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania. Not hard time. Time. I thought wanting something bad enough was all that it took. I thought a move or two would put me int he clear, where no one could touch me. I was young and stupid and I didn’t know anything, but by the time I realized that, it was too late.

Angel

Bradley already knew by heart the tales of the lonely angels that hovered at busty street corners and watched careless children; of angels whose tears for all the unconfessed sins of the world created the mountain streams that emptied into the oceans; and of angels that lived in upholstered charis and waited for lapsed believers to settle unsuspectingly into a suddenly renewed faith…

The Big Bang and the Good House

The morning is thick enough to stir with a spoon. The tower of waffles is cold in a puddle of congealed syrup, mark on her collarbone, which she taps distractedly with a pencil. Replying to her students’ journals occupies hours of her weekend. “Look here,” I say. “they think the universe might have arisen out of pure nothing.” From the newspaper I read:

With Don and Phil at the End of the World

Standing up straight is getting to be more and more difficult these days; always I am leaning into the gray south wind, the land and the sea are leaning, creaking like Greeland ice teetering, everything pale and on tiptoe and leaning downhill all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to wake up tomorrow morning and find the whole thing tilting a bit too steeply and myself sent tumbling head over heels through Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, straight past the copper mines of Chile. What would happen if I were to just keep right on going, tumbling like a drunkard down the stairway of the world, all the way down to the bottom?

Le Voyage

What you have done is really wonderful. Fed me, put me up in your room, given me what you call a second set of clothes, but perfect so far as I can see. I was at the end of everything. And you haven’t even asked me who I am.
I’m delighted I could help a fellow, I said. It was very little. I’m delighted, really, just to have an intelligent person to French to.
Your French is magnificent.

The Old Lady

I had been reading The Arabian Nights at the fire station. At the turn of a peg in his side, no, with no more than a cut with a golden chain over the neck this marvellous black horse would rise to take his rider into the skies. His manger was filled with well-winnowed sesame and barley, his trough held fresh water perfumed with roses. As I read these words, I heard two heavy explosions close by.

Tillman and I

“Name the quad cities,” said Tillman.

It was the middle of the morning and we’d just crossed the Mississippi and entered Iowa. I tried to remember the highway signs we’d passed. “Moline,” I said. “East Moline.” I was stuck. “North Moline and South Moline?”

“I’m sorry,” said Tillman. “You do not win the walnut dinette set. The correct answer is: Moline, Rock Island, Bettendorft, and Davenport.”

“Rock Island sounds pretty.”

“It’s the armpit of the Mississippi. How about a sandwich?”

Always Cold

Even though the flatness of Kansas is sometimes exaggerated, I’ll admit that it’s level in places. It’s particularly level around Oracle, so flat that the sunlight for a week at the equinoxes skips across town like a thrown rock. Women have to hold their skirts down to keep that light from jumping up. A wariness steals into their eyes, like when the man from the bank drives out, and they grip their handbags more tightly, and the men push their hands down into their trouser pockets in fists.

Cassadaga

On a blue evening Skidmore headed north on the interstate to Cassadaga. He didn’t know what to expect, only that he needed to somehow connect with someone who’d recently died. He pulled the tab on a beer and popped in his Allman Brothers tape, “Midnight Rider.”

Knock, Knock, Leave Me Alone

“There was a time in my life when I was addicted to non-profit orgainizations,” Evie confessed, gazing at her audience. There were plates of nachos at some of the tables, people digging in. It made her feel like the exhibitionist in the family, or TV, something you watched while you ate. “I canvassed for everybody–Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Earth First, Pluto Second. I can tell you about my problem now, but that’s only because I’m better. I can say, ‘Hello, my name is Evelyn Singer and I…I…I want you to sign my petition.’ I’m not fully recovered, I still collect signatures. Not for any specific cause, I just collect them. I still protest against things, but little things. Like the other day, I saw my boyfriend Ray throwing out half a banana and I screamed, ‘Save the fruit! Save the Fruit!’”

Taming Monsters

There is a sign, hand lettered on red construction paper, on her son’s bedroom door. It says: NO MONSTERS CAN COME HERE. THAT’S THE LAW. Her son dictated the words to her at bedtime one night. He watched, his wet lips parted, as she wrote the sign and taped it up. Later, getting into bed, he clung to her. “Mommy,” he whispered, “can monsters read?” She reads, these days, books on child development, combing the indexes for FEARS, NIGHTTIME or MONSTERS, FEAR OF. She knows from these books that four year olds are commonly afraid of imaginary beings. She understands that the fears are normal and will pass. “Yes,” she tells her son, “monsters can read.” Her husband does not approve of this. He says that by going along with the fantasies she is reinforcing them. “Robbie,” he says to his son, “there are no monsters. Right?”

“Right,” says Robbie.

Gorepac

I’ve had a long day with the sharks, and Audrey is exhausted after a basement workout. It’s Time for Two time. Bliss out with a drink, take stock, relate. So we make the arrangements: Gabe shooed off to the neighbors, answering machine on duty, and Falafel has his kitty kibbles.

Aud puts together a tray: chips, salsa, a Miller and a Blue Mountain Spring Water, one frosty mug. My thing, to keep glass in the freezer for that extra edge.

The Telegraph Relay Station

Three days beyond the fort on the stage, following the line of telegraph poles like a spider slowly clambering its web. The dry grass prairie is sere and burned looking, like brown skin with a worn ghost of hair on it, the buffalo far to the south at this time of year, Thanksgiven day, but packs of white wolves standing and looking at us curiously. What can they find to eat? All morning long we look forward to seeing the telegraph relay station, mainly beacuse there is utterly nothing else to see. That is the place where I will depart from my two fellow passengers and wait for the stage that comes through from the north, and will take me south to my destination.

No Permanent Bad Thing

One thing I know for true: I want to touch him. I push my hands into my pockets, fists against my hipbones, so they do not move to feel his arm, his back, rub the nape of his neck. I look at him for too long, and when he sees me, I look away, but not before I see him smile.

We are standing under the bridge at Damascus. This is not the bridge whispered about by the grade nine cheerleaders in third period biology, where they come to rumple their clothes and moan and frustrate themselves and their boyfriends. This is the other bridge, the bridge by the old train bridge, the bridge where he comes with my brother and their crew, and they light fires and talk and act stupidly and take off their clothes and sail out onto the river in the rowboat that they dock in the bushes when they leave.

Letter From the Horse Latitudes

Dad, your visit and our agonized parting have stirred up things I’d long since hoped were still for good. Your every gesture spoke a need to ask how I came to be who and where I am. Yet I can remember you as a fugitive. Garner State Park, Texas. We heard on the car radio the police were after you. I was eleven, thrilled to be in the company of a criminal. You who obey all laws great and small, you were deaf to the voice of Authority, fleeing the scene while Mother urged you to turn yourself in. You were (are) a lean man gnawed with American worry, quenching the fire in your gut with buttermilk and Bach, a virtuoso on your major talent, joking your way clear of painful situations.

Luck Be A Lady!

He could never decide if he was a gambler pretending to be an accountant or an accountant pretending to be a gambler. To be a gambler you had to make your living by betting, and he didn’t. To be an accountant you were supposed to be a model of pecuniary conservatism, and he wasn’t. Most of his friends thought the scale tipped in favor of accountant. Unlike most gamblers he had never had great swings of fortune, from storybook winnings to losses taking you over your head into debt, and like an accountant he was careful, cautious even too cautious, some might say, to be a gambler. But he didn’t agree. In fact, he was no great distance between the two, particularly if you excluded from gambling the games of pure chance.

The Phenomenology of Shame

When she passes you in the hall, try to meet her eyes. Look away. Watch her smooth progress reflected in the window. She has not looked at you either. You notice her bruise-coolored shoes. The soft soles. How thin her ankles are. Back the surgery station, pretend to ignore the whispers. Check charts. Note alterations of the vital signs. Don’t participate by asking questions. You will learn enough to make a rough sketch of the facts…

Aki

Aki leans over the steaming bowl. The dashi is the color of tea. She watches several oil blobs float on the surface, gently change shape, combine, as she stirs the soup, as she touches her spoon to the tiny circles of green onion taht float to the top. The steam smells like nothing but heat. She sips fromt he spoon. It is without much flavor, but warm, and has an edge of smoke and metal. The taste after fish. She stares off, distracted by a sudden movement in the yellow leaves outside the kitchen window. They will be off the trees soon, she knows.

Magic and Hidden Things

The part of his job Creech used to like least was having to visiit Port-au-Prince. Four hours from New York, it may as well have been the dark side of the moon. Approaching the airport the plane would cruise low along the coast, over the pale eroded mountains and silted rivers. The jungle that once covered the country was nearly all gone. A few palm trees waved and nodded on the fringe around the runway of the airport, and above a nearby cluster of small cinderblock houses painted pink and lavender.

Improving My Average

The prop plane labored up the Andes’ blue and white spine, at the mercy of blasts and vacuums. My scrambled eggs jittered in their dish, like the coarse yellow foam that storms leave on a beach. I had no intention of eating them: I was counting cities on my fingers, dividing in my head. After calculating backwards twice, I’d just gotten it straight. Being twelve years old, having lived in eight places, I’d inhabited each location of my childhood for on and four-eighths years, eighteen months, too long.

Past Useless

After the night the sheriff came ang got old Alfonso it was like he vanished from earth. Melvina didn’t seem like she missed him, and never mentioned his name except when me and Roy said, “Tell us about the time old Alfonso got after you with that knife, Melvina. Tell us about him Busting the door down with the axe. Tell about when he tried to choke you with a piece of clothesline. Tell about when ya’ll tied him to that chair in the yard. Tell…”

Geezers

The idea of driving over to the coast for the weekend came to him as a revelation–what his English professor used to call an epiphany. Actually it came to him from Debi, his personal secretary. “You look so tired, Warren,” she said. “Last weekend, I left the kids with Pat and went over to Lincoln City and found a motel, and went to bed at nine, and in the morning I had this long walk on the beach. I must of gone a mile. It made all the difference. In case you noticed how cheerful and brilliant I’ve been all week.” Although he did not always get the details, he generally listened to Debi; and this time what she had said, even the words, came to him, as an epiphany, while he was driving home.

The Gravediggers and the Elephant

Baku’s Theory

The Mouse

At the Talent Show

In Every Place

Deaf Mute

Explaining Death to the Dog

The Guy Downstairs Blows Sax

Possessions Unbearable to Lose

Being friends with my father, Dave, was easy. He never scolded me. My mother took care of that by the time he came home from the store. After dinner I got in his lap and he read the pages I pointed to in thin books. He brought me surprise presents and showed me how to shoot a marble hard off the end of my index finger. No other girl I knew could do that. They all did thumbies with the finger crooked around the shooter.

Little Berber Girl

Some couples grow apart instead of together until eventually they separate as naturally as children grow apart and flee their sweet homes. Other couples grow apart together, the rift palpable yet unapparent. So it was with Jonathan and me–except that I saw our ending coming. It seemed our ultimate destiny as surely as Zagora, that arid outpost on the edge of the Sahara, was our immediate one.

Pop! Goes the Weasel

Mandy’s Mama didn’t like weather. She didn’t like it hot, cold, wet, or dry, but above all she didn’t like it stormy. Mama was very cool and tranquil, and she expected the weather to follow suit. She did not approve of storms. If the truth were known, she was afraid of them.

The Parade of Martyrs

I walk behind the whores, who are now too exhausted to complain. Next to me walk two French women who do not talk to me. They are as thin as I am but I am Polish thin and they are French thin, and anyway, we don’t know each other’s lanugages. Perhaps even our lice are now separated this way. Theirs are French fat lice and mine are Polish fat lice. Far ahead I can see SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Kuttner’s half-track swaying in the frozen mud of the snaking country road. For the moment we are safe from Kuttner, whose drunkennesss has wasted him into a kind of sitting corpse whose head wobbles and jerks with the unevenness of the road. It is mid-morning, and we have walked since four a.m. This is our third day marching.

A Tooth for Every Child

Louise, who is pushing down the tall grasses near the land of menopause, accepts an invitation from Mona, who is not that far behind. Mona could use the sight of Louise. “I need a drinking companion,” she says. Louise can hear the twins wailing in the background. “We don’t drink anymore,” Louise reminds her. “But we can talk about it, can’t we? Remember pink gins?” “That wasn’t us, Mona, pink gins. That was our grandmothers.” “Don’t quibble, Just get off the bus at Concord. I’ll pick you up.” “I’ll come Friday. Thursday I’ve got my teeth.”

Lost Deeds, Unbalanced Liens

Dan has been standing in the lobby for five minutes when a woman in a bathrobe runs up to him and starts to yell.

“You creep, you creep. How can you work for those people, those terrible, immoral people?” Her face and neck are flushed red with anger.

While she is screaming, Jerry Fuller, the man Dan is waiting for, comes strolling into the lobby. Dan knows it is Jerry from the way he’s looking around, examining the ceiling and fingering the peeling paint on the wall. Were this building a car, he’d be kicking the tires.

All These Gifts

When the news that Dinah was getting involved with a married man fired through the family, her brother Cal called to remind her that men were like buses: there would be another one along in five minutes. He was handsome and affable, and he was speaking from personal experience.

A Tasteful Revolution

A TASTEFUL REVOLUTION by Josip Novakovich Time: The first decade of XX century. Place: Potgrad, a small town in Slavonia—the southern province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Martha knelt to the forest ground and touched a soft moist round mushroom resembling …

Second Lieutenants Of Literature

The phone wakes me. I fumble across her sheeted body to lift the receiver. It’s my old friend from the Writing Program, eighteen years now, a time before the boom. The younger practitioners considered us rugged precursors, treat us with …

The Last Brown Deli Bag In the Grand Union

My mother is missing. I left her sitting in the passenger side of my grey ’82 Toyota angle-parked downtown in front of the Quik Cleaners while I ran inside. Five minutes it took me, tops, two dresses, a skirt and one of Harry’s suits. I come back to the car. It’s parked slightly cockeyed, but legal. I look inside and it’s empty. At first I think I’m losing my mind. Maybe I took the other car, the Rabbit, but I never drive the Rabbit because of the brakes and the radio. I know I took the grey Toyota, which I always take, and anyway it’s there in front of the cleaners where I left it and my mother isn’t. She’s eighty-five years old; where could she be? She’s frail. She’s hard of hearing. She sees but not so well. I look around. Maybe she needed to pee or something. I go into the store next to Quik and ask if they have an old lady in the bathroom. They think I’m crazy. This is a dress shop for teenagers they tell me. I see that it is. The lights are flashing. The music is playing. The clothes are not real clothes. What would an old lady be doing in our bathroom? they say. I go back on the street and look again. She’s not there. I go back to the car and see the note. It’s on the front seat. We have your mother. Do not panic, it says. You hear that? Do not panic. Go home and wait for our call.

Freddie and The Dreamers

We knew nothing of explosives. But sometimes, at the end of lunch hour, we’d wake from our naps and remember that we were sleeping inside a bunker that stored 100,000 pounds of gunpowder. We’d wake–while those fleeting dreams we never recalled evaporated quickly from our heads–and squint at the sunlight that always hurt our eyes as it brightened the open front doorway of the bunker. Then we’d lift ourselves slowly from the tarpaper floor, which was coated with a layer of rubber so there wouldn’t be any sparks.

Do What You Want

Sara was dancing a little to keep her feet off the cold, gritty cement. The reflection in the glass doors stopped her: an enormous young woman, nearly six foot four and muscular, jigging in the nude through the darkened pool …

Nelly Fallower’s Streetcar

As it was her turn to direct, Nelly Farrower had the choice of plays and chose Streetcar. There followed the usual bitching about how everybody’d seen it and why not something experimental for a change, of which Nelly disdained to hear a word while she budgeted, cleared the schedule with the house committee, ordered the script. She was on the verge of making the cast call when she had a stunning idea.

Modern Love

Sometimes he comes up behind me at the stove and lifts my skirts and we do it right here in the kitchen like a couple of kids. Quite a change from Noah who could only stay hard by imagining me being sawn in half. Robbie is the tallest, nicest man I’ve ever gone out with. His back and shoulders are broad and strong and make me think of the word wingspan. When we go to sleep he folds me in his arms as gently as if I were an origami bird. But nothing is perfect. He is dead broke. And worse.

A Rented Room

Wally’s was the corner room; two rooms, in fact, counting the small bedroom, with a porch large enough for the two rocking chairs and a view of the old watch factory. He’d lived there twelve years, through two owners. With Joseph, the new landlord, he’d grown to a position of responsibility: in exchange for ten dollars weekly off the rent, he swept the halls and kept a set of keys in case any of the tenants lost theirs and needed to be let into their rooms. Joseph lived across town, and didn’t like to be called over for every little nuisance.

Down Among the Gilly Fish

Before they let her have her clothes back so she could go, they reminded her once again — in the gentlest, kindest, most compassionate voices — that she could not see him again. Not in the way she claimed she had. “Oh, in the next life, surely, if you’re of that persuasion,” one of the doctors supposed, “but not in this world. What you see is what you want to see, a mental projection. This happens sometimes to those in certain circumstances.” What she saw was her true heart’s desire, and she understood this. Doctors are very scientific in their explanation. The dead stay dead. Buried is buried.

Open Arms

I have no hatred in me. I’m almost certain of that. I fought for my country long enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps it bothers me a little that his deformity was something he was born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn’t matter. In the end, my country itself was lost and I am no longer there and the two of them are surely suffering, from what I read in the papers about life in a unified Vietnam. They mean nothing to me, really. It seems strange even to mention them like this, and it is stranger still to speak of them before I speak of the man who suffered the most complicated feeling I could imagine. It is he who makes me feel sometimes that I am sitting with my legs crossed in an attitude of peace and with an acceptance of all that I’ve been taught about the suffering that comes from desire.

It’s Love, Buddy

My mother has resurfaced in central Illinois. I read it in the newspaper, Articles from Around the Nation. Stone flamingos disappear from lawns, the article said. I know that’s her. I know how she does it. No one thinks twice when they see an old lady around the neighborhood. She makes friends with the dogs and when she goes back to lift the birds, there’s no trouble. Bones in her pockets and a good idea of the whole neighborhood’s schedule, she’d make a good thief.

The Corner View

The room was large. It was blue and white. There were gilt, mirrored doors on the armoires. A small but elegant crystal chandelier hung in the center of the room. Pristine, handpainted beds. The room was beautiful. But the view of the lake, was not the right one. It was only a corner view. One had to step out onto the tiny balcony and turn one’s head a hard left in order to see it. I saw in an instant that no amount of beautiful room would alleviate this.

Home

The soldier stopped by the gate to the house and stood for a moment. A rank smell of garbage, urine, and boiled cabbage seeped out from the tenement house in Angyalfold and, like a familiar motherly voice in his consciousness, insinuated itself into the soldier’s nose and lungs. He swallowed hard and blanched with joy. It was exactly the same odor he had left behind six years ago when he went out through the gate to join his regiment. Neither in the Ukraine, nor late as a prisoner-of-war did he encounter it. The closest to it were smells in the homes of more or less distant relatives, but they barely stirred his memory; none spoke to him in his mother tongue. But this…this smell was the smell of home; this smell was his country.

Necati Bey

It’s many years later. Necati Bey is presumably still doing his businness in Ankara, in that area of the old city called Copper Alley, and I’ve been back in the States for years. My hair is turning grey at the sides–only little filaments, but enough to make a statement. I’ve settled in with a second wife, a child on the way. It’s still hiding inside her; sometimes I think it’s watching us. I often asked Necati Bey why I had the urge to move back to Seattle after so many years overseas. He sat across from me at the backgammon board in his tiny shop, produced one of his store of Turkish proverbs–”It seems there is bread there for you to eat”–then took advantage of my distracted concentration. I lost a lot of money to him, but he predicted a good life for me upon my return to the States and perhaps I’ve found it. And in a few months, more sustenance, in the form of a young mystery is coming. Perhaps this is why I am remembering Necati Bey. But there is of course more.

9:14 Elizabeth

I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years and the first thing I said when she sat down was, “Jesus, what’s happened to you?” and the first thing from her was, “Can’t you tell a girl she looks nice?” “You look swell,” I said, “but what happened?” “Marriage.”

Chiquita Banana Muy Bonita

Dedos and he looked at each other only once when the couple strolled out of the ruin and then along the dusy road through the market. The camera was still in its case around his shoulder. They were talking animatedly about the great stone figure they had just seen. The two young men stayed twenty yards back, apparently idling away the afternoon. Children they knew called out and muttered alongside and glared, but the two men only bowed mockingly at these old crones, who brooded all day long above the dark toadstools of their volumnious skirts, surrounded by plastic buckets or sacks of coarse-ground corn, heaps of sweaters or small replicas of the gods inside the ruin.

The Great Master

Years passed in this way, this dull, grey quotidian. I was nothing, an endless succession of days, today disappearing into the blur of a past so undistinguished as barely to exist. I decided to eat everything in the house. It seemed a worthy project. To void the house of food. It would be a pure act in an impure world. Bottles, jars, biscuit tins would become pure in its frost, empty, sterile as the white tundra. My body would become a shelter, sculpture, art.

Astronauts

“Next slide,” the astronaut says. For a second, the auditorium is as void and dark as space itself. Then a curve of the earth’s ulcerated surface flashes on the screen and the students’ silhouettes return, bathed in tones of green. This is the third hour in a row Duncan Foley has seen this picture and heard the smiling public relations astronaut, sent, in the wake of the Challenger disaster, to the high school where Duncan teaches. It’s September; attendance at the assembly is mandatory.

Uncle Isaac

My Uncle Isaac’s sexuality, according to my father’s theory, had been marked by the half-woman. Isaac, at thirteen, would sneak into the basement of the Philadephia Medical Museum where a woman’s torso floated in formaldehye. It was 1933, and here–beneath the museum’s upper floors with their public exhibits–reasearch and training about venereal disease was taking place. In a reinforced glass case, at the back of a laboratory room filled with charts and diagrams of progressive syphilis, rested the half-woman, clean of infection except for a lesion on her left breast.

Cottages and Frozen River

For six months, Richard had his own office, windowless and spare. Then management hired a new programmer. Richard had hoped for a quiet man with a need for privacy that matched his own. But the new programmer seemed never to be quiet. His sneakers, gray with age and too large, squeaked when he walked and tapped the floor when he was at his desk. Seated, he muttered to himself, his long fingers strumming the plastic markers that stuck out of his open file drawer. He talked to his computer screen in a low, urgent voice, as if egging on a favorite horse. The walls of Richard’s office became pimpled with notes the programmer wrote to himself on yellow tabs he stuck to the wall, where they accumulated, their edges fluttering under the ceiling ventilator like a new kind of weather.

Eating Air

This story is not currently available online. When the ride got bumpy over the Adirondacks, Rachel’s hand automatically reached for the bakery box, strapped in on the seat next to hers. She’d been traveling with the box for so many …

Touching Bottom

The woman I’ve been seeing lately won’t eat wild meat. Her ex-husband had been a hunter, and perhaps he’d been brutal in other ways or simply a bad cook, but his memory has tainted all wild game for her. This seemed a shame the first time I invited her for a duck dinner and she pushed aside the main course to concentrate on the acorn squash, brussel sprouts, and wild rice. She’s a big-boned woman with a rope of wheat-colored hair down her back and vulnerable blue eyes. She’s thinking, she says, of becoming a vegetarian.

The Price of Bullets

I was fourteen that summer, a typical tangle of teen hormones, growing muscles and deep thoughts. Adulthood seemed so close I could almost taste its fine sweet tang, inhale its musky scents, and run my fingers through its hair.

A Flight of Bones

He can almost not sleep now. Nod, yes. Doze. Latch onto an easel or drop his head for minutes on a worktable, then squint, stare at the canvas. The figures, myriad infinitesimal hairs of color, fill a great eye reflecting them. Around the eye is nothing. He will get to that, yes. That’s always what he is to get to. He raises his head. The bright light behind sends his dark shadow before him, raises his head too. Then his hand makes a dark bone moving. He loves motion. He stands and his shadow rises into the painting, a dark blight, and totters, weak. His stomach is alive with sound. But he has even less desire to eat than sleep. His desire now is only to move. He wants to see motion, where it leads.

Treading Grapes

Leaving their room in the Casa Graciosa, Rebeca Fuerte and her son can smell the coffee from under the door of one neighbor’s apartment, beans from another. Rebeca holds Fernando’s hand a little tighter steering him past those doors and onto the narrow stairway that has its own smells of mildewed walls, of cat urine drying in warped corners. Flat against her body under her free arm, Rebeca carries the tray on which she daily sells cigarettes and wax matches. She is wrapped in a blue rebozo that has been carefully smoothed with her hands after laundering. Though only cotton, the rebozo will be too warm before midday, but it carries her stock.

What Do I Say to Them

We enter a cramped lobby, Lucy Banks, a nurse, ahead of me. The lobby’s floor is a jigsaw of small, black and white ceramic tiles, some broken, others missing altogether. In a row of mailboxes on one wall the name “Ramirez” is crudely scratched into the metal of the box labeled 3B.

“It’s cold in here,” I say. The snow that drops from our shoes isn’t melting.

“They don’t heat lobbies in this part of town, John,” Lucy says.

“They save it for upstairs. It’s 3B, let’s go.”

I’m glad Lucy’s with me. She’s in her forties, twice my age, and I trust her experience. She may be forthright in what she says, but I know she’ll never embarrass me in front of a mother.

A Dry Season

“No, you’re not a failure,” Eleanor says. “That’s nonsense.”

She sounds exasperated, downright angry, but then she laughs. A loud, ribald laugh that Nora, after fifteen years, knows not to take personally. The laugh is Eleanor’s typical response to human problems: it clears the air, puts the situation in perspective. For that, Eleanor says, is what Nora has gotten herself trapped inside. A “situation.”

Nora says, caustically, “You mean I’ve even failed at that? Being a failure?”

Eleanor makes a gesture with her hands, fingers outspread, held clutched above her ears. Pulling out her hair.

Go ahead, Nora thinks.

“It’s just that you’re so intense, so damned serious,” Eleanor says. She laughs again, though less convincingly. “You’ve always been that way, you know. Ever since college.”

“Have I?” Nora says.

Spirit of the House

On the high ground of the Yamanote district of Tokyo, there is a crossroads which is an intersection for trolley cars. Branching off straight and narrow from this crossroads, a slope road leads towards a valley and downtown Tokyo. Midway along this road, facing the shrine of the God of War, there is a small restaurant whose specialty is mudfish soup. Across the top of the doorway, which is framed by delicate latticework, wiped and polished, there hangs an old shop curtain. On it is printed, in white and in the style of calligraphy used for public documents of the Edo period, the ideogram for ‘life’.

Winging It

This was the best part, this opening into the plains. The red Toyota pickup swerved easily down the eastern slope of the pass and Caroline turned up the music. Keith Jarrett’s piano crescendoes echoed the land rising westward, sleek as a hawk’s wing, to the tips of the dark Rockies. Her heart picked up speed; she felt swept clean. She liked to expand her territory inch by inch, a slow, sensual gaining of the world. The geology job helped. Now, Scobey, Montana, a tumbleweed town pinned to the map near the Canadian border. She’d spend a few days in the musty courthouse, probably not much different from the half dozen others she had poked through, poring over old mineral claims, sad diaries of ambition and loss, and then the hikes over the land, looking for ore clues in the rockey outcrops.

Recognizable at a Distance

When it became clear that I didn’t know how to do anything to make a living, in other words when it became clear that the promise of my sensibility was not a lucrative promise, Daddy kindly sent me off to Tulane to get my M.S.W., it being agreed on all hands but my own really that soical work was an appropriate field for a young woman who had insisted for many years that she was interested only in the nature of experience and what it meant to be human. I was twenty-two. My father had stopped repeating his observation that I was a “hellcat,” but nobody had ever paid me for a poem. I was, after all, grown up, they said, and so for the fifth time I left my home in Hunter County, Mississippi, a home that I had treated as a sort of halfway house for some years by then, and went out into the world.

Time Paid For is Easy to Forget

They were sitting around a trash fire when the American came with Mara and took the guitar from Jaime. The fire was of old broken crates and pallets, the leavings of every port city. It had not been built for warmth; the Philippine nights were always warm and humid. It had been built for the sake of community; it gave light, and gave them a center around which to form a circle, and cost only the refuse scraps of wood from the Naval complex at the port. The American sat in the center of the group with the girl at his side and tried to tune the guitar.

Blood and Water

Imagine first a dignified British butler holding aloft a very large teapot and, followed by a serving maid pushing with some difficulty a tea trolley containing cups and saucers and plates of cucumber sandwiches, advancing the length of a smooth and extensive lawn at the bottom of which flows a river, and on the bank of the river a large weeping willow tree, and in its shade six young people and an elderly dame reclining in arious postures opon tartan horse blankets and swatting idey at the flies. It is August 1936, a cloudless Friday afternoon, and England is at peace.

Real Estate in New Jersey

It was a Friday night at the end of August, a mild night without a trace of humidity. There was not a breeze to be felt, and it could almost be said that it was a night without temperature, so still and comfortable was the air.

Ruby’s Gift

Ruby, who was married to Mother’s Uncle Bubba, stood in her stocking feet five foot ten inches, with masses of red hair and a pompadour that increased her stature to six feet when she sucked in her stomach, squared her shoulders and leveled her chin at the world. Her world was a small one, but it had all the ingredients needed for love and glory and backbiting and the like.

The Fox Fairy at the FRA

I waited for him in front of the Fleet Reserve Association’s clubhouse, which towered conspicuously above the one-story shops on either side. When he arrived, it was beginning to rain. He parked his motorbike next to mine under the awning and we hurried to the door. A bunch of Chinese kids stood around, punked-out and looking like they had money to burn, but it was Saturday night and they would have a hard time getting in without a member’s help.

Aunt Moon’s Young Man

That autumn when the young man came to town, there was a deep blue sky. On their way to the fair, the wagons creaked into town. One buckboard, driven by cloudy white horses, carried a grunting pig inside its wooden slates. Another had cages of chickens. In the heat, the chickens did not flap their wings. They sounded tired and old, and their shoulders drooped like old men.

Car Wash

Thief wonders if it will rain. There is the smell of it in the air. Miles to the west, beyond the town limits, a line of black, full-bellied clouds moves into the valley. He stand up from where he is working on his mother’s roof to look at them. Two blue jays flap angrily around him, swooping and scolding. Thief is trimming branches from the tree where they have their nest.

The Motions of the Animals

“That one yonder is the head dog then?” said B.J., looking at the black and tan hound curled up in the dust by one of the sections of oak stump supporting the front porch of the house. It was getting on toward evening, and the long shadows of the afternoon sun fell across all of the dog but his head and part of one front leg.

The Only Thing You’ve Got

There was this guy on the television one time, he’d written a book and had gotten used to seeing his picture in the papers. Donna and I had the color set in the bedroom then, and this guy had on a suit that looked borrowed. He held a pipe in his hand and pressed into the bowl with his thumb. He didn’t smoke, which was probably not allowed on the set, but he looked like he wanted to.

How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson

Thomas Furlong was a grizzled and sour bachelor of fifty who lived solitary and alone in a log house which stood remote and lonely in the middle of a great cornfield at the base of the rising spurs of the mountains. At two o’clock on a certain morning he came in out of a drizzling rain, lit his tallow dip, pulled down the cheap oiled shade of the single window, punched up his fire, took off his steaming coat, hung it before the fire to dry, sat down, spread his damp hands in front of the blaze, and said to himself–

“It’s a puzzle. I wonder what ever did become of her. Seven hours. Maybe she ain’t as much of a fool as people think.” He sat silently considering the puzzle for some moments, then added, with energy, “Damn her! Damn her whole tribe!”

from The Hermit Journals

I do not advertise as a taxidermist, but each year I take a little work, mostly local. Occasionally, a downstater will get lucky and shoot a trophy white-tail on the opener, and for the right price I will mount the buck’s head, usually a ten-pointer or better. My reputation has spread these past few years, so I can choose and charge what I want.

A House and Its Neighbors: A Cautionary Tale

On the northern edge of the woods, just short of the municipal forest of S, a town whose citizens were, for the most part and by tradition, complacent and well-to-do, stood a nearly square little house on underpinnings of heavy oak beams. This house was built of spruce boards originally soaked in ox blood. Its south side, with a door and two tiny windows, faced the woods and was shaded by towering firs. There were two more windows on the north side, and one each in the smaller side walls. The whole thing was topped off by a nearly flat tile roof whose eaves extended not much more than a foot beyond the low walls all around. This little house had been built by a certain Egloff, who had done menial work in the big chemical plant in the town of R for over fifty years.

Exiles

It is Saturday, a French legal day of rest, but Robert Thorley can feel a humming tension in the air. It is Lisette who is to blame. Poor Lisette! She is making an occasion, a major celebration out of what should be just a simple meal.

Safari

My father and I are on safari. He wears a deluxe pith helmet with a decorative red strap and reinforced air holes. His sumptuous safari jacket is festooned with gussets, map pockets, zippered pouches, epaulettes, and a broad belt drawn with flair about his pot belly.

The Shoplifter’s Apprentice

She rounded the corner into the aisle with the beer and chilled wine and almost crashed into a man holding open the flap of his parka, stuffing an inside pocket with what looked like a bottle of champagne. He was so thin and the jacket so big, that when he jerked it across his chest the bottle was swallowed up–except for a barely discernable curve of glass against nylon, invisible.

The Boys from This School

He is one of the boys from this school so he wears a green military uniform and has a shaved head. He is a freshman and his name is James. He stands at the door of Kelly’s office to talk to her after class. As she looks up at him she runs her hand through her short blond hair; she always wonders if her students think she looks attractive or merely curious in the flight jacket, trousers, and jumpboots because she would rather look like them than like the few older female faculty in their skirts and pumps.

Anyuta

Every sunday during winter all the townspeople emerged after an early dinner to walk along the main street.

His Brother

Today, the road to town is widened. Sidewalks, service stations, 7-Elevens fill the space where alfalfa fields and orange groves once spread.

Partners

It was the hottest summer in ten years and the woods were dry as paper. There were hundreds of burns up and down the Rockies and still days, which was most of them, a think haze hing over Missoula from fires as far as fifty miles.

The Total Stranger

He walked slowly and apperently speculatively, as well as dubiously eastward, along the semi-tatterdemalion street in which at one time he and Mady (Amelia) had lived??or should he say, had existed??he and she, and for reason of what? His wish? Hers?

An Earthquake in China

I can’t remember now if it’s Richie Cort who was the kid with Leukemia and Burt Green who is the baseball star, or whether it’s the other way around. My eyes sting in the cathode ray shower gushing from my video display termial, ink from the disintegrating papers scattered about the newsroom clogs my pores, the desk is screaming for copy??but I’m not even sure if I’m Stanley Besserman the newspaper reporter.

Second Hands (1970)

I think the worst coward can ignore fear even when it sweeps over and over you like the second hand of a clock. I’m platoon leader, and pretty much the worst coward in my outfit, so on a mine-sweep operation I’ll try to think of something that I can picture whole and concentrate on completely.

Throwback

“Yank.”
“Here,” I said, and set cigar smoke in motion.

Wise Virigin

The lycee girl waits. There is only one at once, I guess they must take turns. Her level, level stare. Is this a joke? Some sort of ethnology or psychology laboratory they are running for a project they must do in school?

Pigeons

Mrs. Dewar di the talking. She said, “Acquisition is the real beginning of heartbreak.”

The Professional Thief

My moment of truth, said Steadman, was when I told them how rich my family was, and I got in the fraternity. Steadman found what we photographers discover–pleasing composition.

The Shopper

When his wife died John Tilden sold the house and moved into an apartment across town. It was a nice apartment near a neighborhood park like those one finds scattered through every city. A bus stopped at the corner.

Reflections on a Child’s Water Wheel

Henry David Thoreau’s remark in Walden that he had for a long time been a “reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation,” was a fairly grim private joke. Since leaving college in 1837, he had kept a journal that would …

from The Closest Possible Union

How many species? Surely as many as there are stars in the heavens, from live glued onto a strand of hair to powerful gnats which can pierce a mans boot, from aphid cows enslaved by ants to weevils napping comfortably inside curled poplar leaves.

Ferguson’s Wagon

Everybody who knew about it–and that was everyone in Breemsburg–told somebody else about the Ferguson place. Inquisitive Saturday or Sunday afternoon guests might even be loaded into the car and driven by the Fergusons just to save the explanation.

1″ Neoprene

Allen Ramos came up from California wearing haruche sandals and a peacoat with a tear in the lining. The coat he took off when the weather grew too warm, which in Seattle is not uncommon during the summer, notwithstanding the big storms that come in from the west every few weeks.

Gifts

Storm-blue clouds, a circle of slate-blue mountains, a ridge I could barely make out between the mountains and the clouds–that’s what it looked like from the bedroom window.

Some Glad Morning

“Moody,” he heard Rae Holler. “Tim’s waiting.”

He balanced the guitar case on the arms of his chair, shouted “bye” to Rae in the kitchen and wheeled himself out.

Mrs. Dawson

It was after father came in from the gooseyard Friday evening, telling me to return the varmit pistol to his closet, that I first spotted the box of letters shoved beneath his lowest closet shelf, partially hidden by his Mother’s clothing.

Saigon Tea

There was a record player, a bartender, and a girl behind the bar. The girl was young, not more than sixteen, and wore the long white tunic and silk trousers of a student.

Stoics

In September of 1964, when my younger sister Sarah and I were already on the way to learning stoicism in the face of the unexpected, we were taken like the orphans we had become to Hoover Hansen’s farm in the tobacco country outside of Danville, Virginia.

The Rangold Consortium

At Gardner’s Labor Day barbecue in Cos Cob, Rangold suggested, after a few gin and tonics, that we form a consortium.

Chambers Famous Bar

Pauline was always the strong one as far as I knew. And I knew pretty far, from ’47 when I got off the train from VA in Wichita and first went to Chambers Famous Bar.

Nelcedelia

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Suite 1306

Ginger had agreed to have a drink with that hairy, fat sales rep from Parkers, Herb what’s-his-name, first, because she had already refused him on at least five previous occasions, and she couldn’t risk losing the account.

Meet Senor Kaposi

The Venusian invasion is a takeover of the Egyptian seven souls: Ren is degraded by Hollywood down to John Wayne levels. Sekem works for the Company. The Khu’s are all transparent fakes.

Whittle

This was 1963, this was spring, Warren just hitting fourteen and all of them sweating the lump inside his great-uncle’s cheek. As far back as anybody could remeber, uncle Rudi had smoked a little clay pipe, thin and black as a thorn.

G-2

“Any calamities?” Supervisor Barbara Henley asked.

“No.” Ross finished his last entry in Ward G-2′s daily notes, slid the brown notebook across to her, and lit a cigarette. Henley began copying into the master log.

News

“Don’t tell me about chicken slaughter. I’ve been there,” Jean shouted. She’d walked down the road and into Rochelle’s kitchen, for the first time in six years, return visit she called it, and there she was, in white shorts, sitting on a stool at the free-standing counter Rochelle called an Island.

The Log of the Pipistrel

A grand ship she is. Now July 4, 8 p.m. Latitude 32.7 North, Longitude 136.5 West. Sea smooth, weather pleasant. Crew attired in white. Thonight’s menu: spring pie, raw puffer , haggis pudding, Scotch chops, Rouen Duck.

Country Things

It was the third week in July, nine days after my thirteenth birthday. My older brother Cal, and I were walking beans, the temperature up around ninety and humidity just as high, the afternoon sun sharp as a welding torch.

A Place of Light

“When Robert’c car broke down the second time, he said, “You Kids stay out of my hair. Go across that ditch to those weeds.” Ma leaned her head against the window and looked out.

The Find

Three blocks from Eleanor Coney’s apartment was a basement store filled from floor to ceiling with used books. Stacked on wooden crates serving as shelves, piled in the narrow aisles, wedged into cardboard cartons and dumped into disorderly mounds, were mildewed National Geographics, incomplete sets of encyclopedias, frayed Victorian classics….

The Cuevas

After the surgery, I pecked the shell enclosing me, though I had no real intention of breaking it.

Sometimes I actually would be asleep; but not most of the time. No one knew for sure, because the doctors had said to my family (I was there): “The brain. The Eyes.”

The Yellow House

“Why yellow?” I asked as my Uncle Billy walked out of the garage, carrying two cans of paint. He was wearing a pair of olive-green, fatigue-pant cut-offs, and he was covered from head to foot with flecks of dried-out white paint that had stuck to his sweat-drenched skin.

The Jesuit

In those years she believed in God without wanting to examine the belief. She carried the idea of God inside her the way many people carry inside them the thought of their own eventual extinction–it was logical, perhaps even consoling, but it could not be confronted head-on.

Daley’s Girls

My father came home from work on weeknights long after we had eaten our supper and gotten into our pajamas. The Six of us watched from the living room while he sat at the kitchen table to have his supper.

The Parachutists

It is Abilene’s idea to try an Arab restaurant. She has never had Arabic food , and the idea, in Mecio City has particular appeal. She has heard of a place just off the Zocalo, in a neighborhood where cheap yard good are sold. Isabel’s sister Ceci and her voluble student friends go along, knowing that Isabel, a money-lender, will pay for it.

The Lady from Lucknow

WHEN I WAS FOUR, one of the girls next door fell in love with a Hindu. Her father intercepted a lovenote from the boy, and beat her with his leather sandals. She died soon after. I was in the room …

Coda

When Charlie’s brother called and said he was moving to Israel, Charlie thought it was the first line of a joke. But Leon was serious. “We’ve sold the house. The closing was this morning.”

Burglars

We stood in front of the Springers’ house, Gary Erickson with his his four-ten, Henry Forrester with a Luger, and me with a 30.06. We were pointing our guns at two burglars holding Ted and Mary Springers’ television set, ready to load it into the back of their van.

Frying Pan

“COMING HOME TO MY APARTMENT building on a hot Saturday afternoon, I saw my new downstairs neighbor, Sydney, hunched over on the stoop, his head sun between his fists.”

Frontier Justice

“SHE WAITED IN A LOBBY hardly bigger than a parking space for the trial to resume–with jurors, spectators, plaintiff, defendant all sharing the same thin air, the same thin conversation. That was one difference between this court and most in the lower forty-eight.”

At the Hop

“I’M TRYING TO SING the most popular song of the year,”The Hop,” by Danny and the Juniors as I whip the towel around my arms and legs. I’m not much at grooming. It’s hard to sing it for more than a minute without stopping and thinking you’re silly.”

Epidemic

It occurred to Lazaro Reyes, M.D., that if he could kill one child, just one child, everything would be all right again. The problem was to find the child. Having found him, Lazaro would know what to do:a quick glide of the scalpel across the throat, the body hung by its feet over the garden faucet drain. He was sure his hands wouldn’t tremble; he would not hesitate. Such was his rage against that face of innocence: black mop of hair, brown-gold eyes, snub nose and full lips, atop a lanky body within filthy, loose clothes.

Foreigners

The door of the next hotel was open. A narrow carpet of light extended across the sidewalk, a sign Laurie took as a welcome. She said bonsoir and explained to the woman behind the desk that she wanted a single room.

Today Will Be A Quiet Day

“I THINK IT’S the other way around,” the boy said. “I think if the quake hit now the bridge would collapse and the ramps would be left.” He looked at his sister with satisfaction. “You are just trying to scare your sister,” the father …

The Object of Today’s Lesson

A couple sit in a living room, drinking. The room is nicely furnished. There is art on the walls, books, etc. To the right rear of the stage there are French doors leading to a caged swimming pool. Only a …

People That Dream, Whales That Dance

Julian says he’s looking for something. Julian’s my father and we’ve been living here in Cabin #7 Habor Lights Motor Inn since early May.

The Absence of Shakespeare

A reunion was to be held on the Chuckney. Phil–Philip Sheridan he was named, the youngest son–was making all the arrangements, with the able assistance of his wife Willie, who, though married to him for two and a half years now, had never met all his family.

Collusion

“Boys,” said the boss last Friday afternoon, “you two ought to be able to keep an eye on things.” He said he had business over in Auburn. “Personal. Won’t be back till after hours.”

Tales from Alleyways

BEHIND A BARRED basement window a child’s small face. To any likely passerby he cries, “Hey, Uncle, please “ The passerby stops. “What do you want?” “Out. I want out.” “What stops you?” “The locked door.” “No one is with …

The New Captain

By the time the old captain was finished a third of us were dead or wounded, and the rest had been pushed so hard for so long that we were all nerves and suspicions, reduced to feeding our faces and hoping for one night’s uninterrupted sleep.

Two-Head Fred and Tree-Foot Frieda

Frogchild on the Day of Christus Corpi explores seventy-five years of Caribbean history as seen through the eyes of an old physician recalling the central mystery that spans the generations of his family-the birth of a frogchild to the nun Magdalena.  …

Reb Nachman of Bratslav and The Sultan’s Daughter

This novel is the imaginative recreation of a year in the life of the 18th century storyteller and rabbi, Reb Nachman, great-grandson of the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov.  Nachman’s stories are said to have influenced Franz Kafka …

Erotic Geography

Set at a university in the Deep South, Hyman and Hymenoptera explores the return South of Hyman Glover, a southern-born, half-Jewish, Yale-educated entomologist of once great promise.  Glover’s obsession with his own southern heritage and his growing fear of insects has caused …

from Taking Leave

As much from compassion as from love, Will Brenner has married a desperately neurotic woman, Laura.  After the suicide of Laura’s father, Will and Laura parented Laura’s much younger sister, Jo.  In this excerpt Will plays squash with his medical …

In The Balance

“In the Balance” is from the author’s novel, The Greek Garden,which takes place in the spring and early summer of 1942 in the spring and early summer of 1942 in Chicago’s Greek American community.  A family of Greek intellectuals with an …

from Crooner’s Party

  The setting of Crooner’s Party is the southern Mekong Delta several weeks after the Tet Offensive.  Blueswords and Chemists are U.S. Navy river assault divisions supporting Crooner and Langley, U.S. Infantry battalions.  They are searching for the Viet Cong Tay Do …

from The Children’s Bullet

Mary Bringle’s novel, The Children’s Bullet, chronicles an American woman, Mary Flynn, who is startled from a vaguely empty and dissatisfying life by a newspaper account of the death of a child, also named Mary Flynn, in Belfast. The child has …

The Secret Feather

On that Saturday afternoon before the ice and while the exterminator was still roaming around her house, Jane phoned Diana Tunbridge to tell her that she was coming over, after all. They arranged to meet halfway across the meadow so that they could walk back together to Diana’s where Jane would spend the night. By the time she had collected her things and packed her backpack she was overtaken once again by that familiar dolefulness that assailed her whenever she deserted her mother and father. It worried her to leave them to their own devices even when she was angry at them. They were still sitting quietly in the living room when she came downstairs, and she stopped in the doorway to say goodbye, but both Avery and Claudia were abstracted, and her mother was a little irritable.

The Genealogies

All of us, whether or not we descend from noble lineages, have our genealogies. I am descented from Genesis, not out of pride, but out of necessity. My parents were born in a Jewish Ukraine, very different from the Ukraine of today, more different yet from the Mexico where I was born, this Mexico, Federal District, where I had the luck to come into the world amid the cries of the merchants at the Merced market, those merchants whom my mother, dressed in white from head to foot, used to stand watching in amazement.

I can’t be accused, like Isaac Babel, of flowery writing or bookishness, since unlike him (or my father) I didn’t study Hebrew or the Bible or the Talmud (because I wasn’t born in Russia and I’m not male). Like Joan of Arc I hear voices, but I am not a maid and I have no desire to be burnt at the stake, although I am attracted by the gaudy and beautiful colors that Shklovski condemned Babel for when they were not yet old men, and that he remembers nostalgically now that he is one (that is to say, Shklovski remembers, because Babel died in a concentration camp in Siberia, 14 March 1941).

Mr. Rogers at Night

His wife told him at the dinner table that it wasn’t right for male and female cousins to be living together under one roof.

“It was bad enough when their grandmother was alive,” Alice Rogers said. “Cora was so deaf those two could have been humping till daylight for all she’d know.”

“She was only deaf in one ear,” Orson Rogers said, extracting a piece of gristle from his mouth. His wife always bought cheap roasts, and he felt swindled.

“She only heard what she wanted to hear.” Alice Rogers tapped her finger on the table in a precise, aggravating beat. “I asked Cora Hendricks which side she slept on at night, and she said the right. That’s her good ear! Orson, that woman winked at me; said it was a blessing to be deaf in one ear. All you had to do was sleep on the good one. The walls could fall down around you for all you cared.” Alice wiped her fingers over her mouth. “What do you suppose kind of noises she was shutting out?”

His wife’s voice took on a hypnotic depth and power whenever she talked about other people. Initially, it had been the husky magnetism of her voice that had drawn him to her. For several Sundays during the summer he was twenty-five, he had listened to her read the Bible, then proposed to her like a man spellbound. Her oratory had stirred him to imagine what passion lay behind her words. After he married her, he decided it had been the idea of burning in the afterlife.

The Posse

Word of Uncle Luden’s visit came in the form of a postcard from Reno, Nevada, with his loose purple scrawl: Make plenty that good cornbred, Il’e be there soon. He signed both names, Luden Sorrells.

My grandmother didn’t allow me to examine the postcard because it was a photograph of dancing girls naughtily clad. Johnson Gibbs, the eighteen year old orphan boy who had come to live and work on our farm, sneaked it out for me and we looked at it for a long time behind the corncrib, but I was disappointed. A long line of girls taken from a distance and all the important details blurred. “I can’t see anything,” I complained

He grinned. “You sure you know what to look for?”

Though the photograph was disappointing, the message was glorious news.

My father nudged Johnson’s elbow. “We’re going to eat fine now. Uncle Luden is the prodigal son. Any fatted calf in the neighborhood, his days are numbered.”

“Prodigal son how?” Johnson asked.

“Just like in the Bible,” my father said. “Uncle Luden will lie down with the swine. Or anything else handy.”

The farm work that had got the best of us until Johnson showed up to help had disgusted Uncle Luden early in his career. My mother’s brother had little of her sunny but long-suffering patience. In the back alfalfa fields he had found a dilapidated old hay wagon and had worked it over until it looked sturdy and bright and something like new. On his sixteenth birthday he sold the wagon to a gullible neighbor, bought a second-hand motorcycle, and sped off to California in a cloud of gravel and a hail of loose bolts.

Armadillo

Jack says there’s nothing out here but a lot of nothing, nothing but a lot of space. He says he likes it that way, all sky and dirt spreading out from one side to the next with nothing in between but highway and bean fields and arroyos pointing toward the little black dots that are us. When we drive, he looks straight ahead. He says you’ve got to take things as they come, watch your landmarks, and not want more than what you’ve got to begin with, otherwise you get lost and go blow away like dust. He says if you take what’s there to begin with, then what happens won’t sneak up behind you. That’s why he traps the wild dogs that live down in the arroyo. He brings them home and locks them up in the old Chevrolet out back. Those dogs are so mean you have to poke their food in through the side window with a stick so you don’t get your hand bit off. Slobber and dog fur on the windshield so thick sometimes you can’t see what’s inside, but boy, can you ever hear them when you walk by. Miss Jewel, Tom Go and the rest, they try to keep the dogs off with guns and poison, but Jack traps them alive. Three years ago, a pack of them broke through Miss Jewel’s fence and carried off two pies and her pet chihuahua, but none of them will ever come around our place anymore. They know better than to come sneaking around when they hear their friends yeowling inside the Chevy.

Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story

To begin, then, here is a scene in which I am the man and my friend Sarah Cole is the woman. I don’t mind describing it now, because I’m a decade older and don’t look the same now as I did then, and Sarah is dead. That is to say, on hearing this story you might think me vain if I looked the same now as I did then, because I must tell you that I was extremely handsome then. And if Sarah were not dead, you’d think I were cruel, for I must tell you that Sarah was very homely. In fact, she was the homeliest woman I have ever known. Personally, I mean. I’ve seen a few women who were more unattractive than Sarah, but they were clearly freaks of nature or had been badly injured or had been victimized by some grotesque, disfiguring disease. Sarah, however, was quite normal, and I knew her well, because for three and a half months we were lovers.

Two Ends of the World

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At the Shore

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Chicken Soup

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from Puttering About in a Small Land

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The Plain, The Endless Plain

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from Fast Friends

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The Quarrel

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Apocalpyse

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The Trouble with the Cotton People

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Literatures of Milieux

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Dogs’ Lives

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Bagatelle

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Cash Crop

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The Secret Meeting with Mr. Eliot

Dear Professor Wally,

This is not a poem about a cat. It is my life. I graduated from high school during the height (depth?) of the depression. Three students in my class went to college. Although I was valedictorian (Latin: valedictus, bidden goodbye) and spoke on “The Promise of the Future,” I was not one of them.

Finding the Women

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Sepulcher By The Sea

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That’s How Strong My Love Is

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His Color

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All True Rites and Lawful Ceremonies

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Woe to Live On

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A Tiger for Malgudi

We passed through many villages, big small, towards I don’t know where, as I followed my Master; everywhere people made way for us, retreated hurriedly, staring in wonder and disbelief, afraid even to breathe.

Down from Coeur d’Alene

At nightfall, when they stopped across the river from Lewiston, Mary Ann was not crying and said she would only be a minute. She got out of the jeep. Kyle put the gun in his belt, zipped up his jacket, and got out after her.

About Three Years Ago

When I was thirteen my father got hit by one of those laundry trucks that come around real early in the morning and pick up diapers. Dad was out running before work and I guess it was still pretty dark, so the driver didn’t see him. I heard my Uncle David tell Jummy that he’d been mashed up pretty good and the driver “must have been going at a God-damn quick clip to do something like that.”

Caveat Emptor

Joey Rogovin swung in and out of the way of the hard platoon marching like hammers on the Boardwalk. Like one more in the vast undulant sheet of searching pigeons, he would move aside for the rectangle of men and then fold back the wake behind them. And like the pigeons, he was a gleaner too.

A Hunk of Burning Love

Gene is already there when I come through the door of the New Deal Cafe and Bar. There’s a sausage speared on the end of his fork and he’s waving it in Rita’s face. Gene’s a fat man but a long way from jolly; he can in fact be mean as a snake if you give him half a chance.

Toward the Sun

Nieman runs in the mountains. He starts from our small house in town at seven thousand feet, and in a few minutes, I see his maroon sweat suit drifting among the dark spruce near the Ute Chief Mine at 7,500. When I returned from the garden with the day’s pick of beans, lettuce, and squash (we got no tomatoes at this altitude), he will be nearing the lip of Silver Lake, a cold, shallow, fishless sea at eight thousand feet.

from Internal War

The poet had come to the end of the road. He went down the Avenida La Paz. But, according to the Junta, the Internal War was just beginning. The strange cortege halted. Although the tune was distantly familiar, he couldn’t quite make it out.

from Dead Sea

Night was running ahead of itself. People weren’t expecting it at all when it fell upon the city with heavy clouds. The lights on the docks hadn’t been turned on yet; in the Beacon of the Stars sad bulbs illuminated the glasses of cane liguor;many sloops were still cutting the waters of the sea when the wind brought on a night of black clouds.

from “Point In Time”

The armada lay under the water, and the land of Spain lay above, color of camels and saffron.

The Wind, The Cold Wind

I was almost at the top of Victoria Road, under the big maroon hoarding advertising Camp Coffee, when I heard Jimmy James shouting.

Proud Monster: Sketches

The three of us were drunk as usual, on spirits confiscated from the executed. First there was Matthes, whom I thought of as “the poet” because he fancied himself an intellectual and this his stint in Einsatzgruppe C an adventure for a man of refined tastes. During our conversations he would jot notes in a leatherbound journal. Then there was Kohler, recently new to our drinking group, a large man who spoke rarely and was given to black moods.

The Gala Dinner

One thing, at least, was clear: he hadn’t given those long gray years in the candy store for this. Something had gone wrong; somewhere in the project to horde nickels and dimes over years of cokes, banana splits, and chewing gum there was a fraud.

Canopic

When touring the Ozarks in ’06 the Govenor learned of a spa, famed for its medicianl baths, and went there. He was greeted by the host and quickly introduced to an array of clay cones, from which gurgled a soapy mud heavily charged with alkali and radium.

Music Lover

“It wasn’t any one thing,”she says with an easy shrug. “It’s never just one thing. It was a whole lot of little things pulling me apart — just pulling me to the breaking point.”

Stand in a Row and Learn

When I knew him, everybody called him Ears (on account of the obvious), but his true name was Dorcey Eugene Wingo and he liked to speak of himself in the third person, his voice a mostly sing-song instrument of twang and nosework.

The Quick and the Dead

The bull was a red Hereford, named Job, we had owned only a week, or perhaps I should say that a week earlier Dad sold us further in debt to the Farmers and Merchants’ Bank.

Early Murphy: Eight Sketches

A place of shouts, swats, suet and saurkraut, Murphy’s neighborhood was pure German. All up and down the block the mothers were fat, loud and from Milwaukee. In aprons, rolled-down hose and shoes with powerful heels, they were porch stompers, lawn shakers, Wiener schnitzel screamers. But their husbands were not.

In The Icebound Hothouse

It is true that I have not been able to utter more than a madman’s sound since my eyes beheld the sight. I’ve lost speech. And so they have asked me to write. Since you are a poet, write, they told me. Little do they know what they might get. Little, even, do I.

From “Elizabeth and James”

Why do I persist in playing this part? Why pull on boots & buckle on sword & mount my too costly horse & ride like a proper gent over to Essex House there to swagger about the courtyard? To swap lies & fables with others who, whoever they may be, have no more business or good purpose here than myself.

Holding

He had to turn wide to avoid hitting the large empty cardboard box they’d left in the driveway. Marsha’s new refrigerator must have been delivered, which meant that her latest adventure in redecoration was nearly complete.

Scars

His dog had bitten a child. It was very late in the afternoon when Ted Landy stepped into the kitchen, closed the back door, and took off his gloves. “I’ve seen the boy,” he said. “It doesn’t look good.”

The Sound of Pines

Immigrants

The first dead dog of the day was a shepherd that had been given a nosebleed by the car that knocked it into the weeds. The breed of the next one, thirty miles or so further on, was impossible to determine; it had been run over so often that it was flat and dry as a pelt.

A Father, A Daughter

When I was six I loved my father passionately; hearts flew, as they say, whenever I saw him, and we were as chaste as teenage lovers in a forties movie. At six p.m. he veered to the curb in his sky-blue Ford roadster: he wore a green bow-tie; he stepped off the running board with a heart shaped box of chocolate kisses and a bunch of violets in his hand; he gave them to me.

Keepers

With a name like Emory he should never have left the South. Growing up in Mobile had almost been enough. The summer he was seventeen he decided to see it all before he left it.

Lieberman’s Father

Lieberman had his eyes on his chicken salad and so at first didn’t see the woman. She stopped short at his table and stood, swaying a little this way and that, looking like a person who had just bumped into something and is wondering if she hurt herself. To the people at the next table it was clear what she’d bumped into was Lieberman.

The Life of Howard

One way to see it. Flashing before his eyes.

Night Vision

It is early when we go into my room, seven maybe, or eight. In February it’s already dark. I have turned the lights off in the kitchen, the front room. China Blue is standing by my bed, dropping his shoes.

A Disturbance of Gulls

That summer, he did not know–until he drove up to the summer house on the island and there was no one to come to the door and embrace and welcome him, no old man to surprise, first with the bark of his dog, Pal, then the scurrying of Shasta and the Whore of Babylon and the half-dozen other cats, no old man to bend over the kitchen table, his crippled fingers around the bowl he drank tea from, who would turn his quivering albino eyes up and squint, “Is it you? You?” with the abrupt cough of his laughter and the joyful cackle in his throat–no, he did not know that it would be the summer of his pursuit.

In The Woodsmoke Light

I had to move into town when Augie died of the heart attack. Couldn’t keep that house up on the hill all by myself and with Dade and Bobby grown and gone their separate ways.

The Death of Cardinal Newman

At fourteen, Sebastion Blessing has already decided to be a porno movie maker when he grows up. But he doesn’t tell people that. Instead, he tells them he would like to play bassoon in the philharmonic orchestra.

Crows

For weeks, it seemed–since her thirtieth birthday–the crows had been noisy around the house. Karen watched them through the kitchen windows after Michael left for the office.

Under the Swaying Curtain

Kill me, man, you shitting?
Whistler leaves his desk and sits near Chan Lai Washington. It is late in an August afternoon, and both of the boys are being kept after their 8th grad summer school class because of a prank, but now the prospect of big business temporarily cuts through the humid tedium.

The sound of Pines

A thick mist obscures the road, and there is a black sedan with the headlights burning. It is impossible to tell the time of day: whether it is afternoon or evening or if the night has only just surrendered to the dawn. The road is straight and flat and with only two lanes. The heavy fog hides billboards, even utility poles and the other road marks that might give the car’s occupants a sense of motion. Only the regular clump-clump of the car’s tires over the pavement divisions suggests they are going somewhere.

Meat

It’s strange, the things you find yourself doing. Right now I’m a spotter for a repossessor. I drive through the streets at three or four in the morning, and when I spot a car that’s on my order list I call it in on my two-way radio. Then in minute the pros come along in the van. One of them breaks in while the other one opens the back of the van and puts down a metal ramp. They drive the car up the ramp. They pull the ramp in. They pull the doors shut behind them. And they drive away. The whole thing takes less than two minutes.

Houses

Forrest tells Nita they ought to go for a ride, to cheer her up; he’ll take her out to where he’s been working lately, show her some of the pretty homes out there. She’s not through cleaning house — it’s Saturday — but she puts on her black pants and scarlet blouse, with the white shoes she she wears at work in the bakery, and tightens the combs that hold her hair in its soft, sagging upsweep.

Storm Watch

The week after Christmas, we dragged out the tree, trailing silvery snippets of tinsel, to the curb, where an unknown service group would make its skeleton disappear at an unlikely hour.

At Mercy

In his over-sized V-necked sweater, sitting in front of the cold fireplace, he looked, she though, like a bleak husband.

Rumors

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The Changeling

This story is not currently avaible online The Changeling Joyce Carol Oates When father was finally released from the hospital at Vanderpoel he was much changed in his heart, and nobody would acknowledge the fact but me.  They have all …

Poetic Devices

My language is a freak two-headed fish that lives only in one pond in a remote mountain region. No other two-headed fish exist, and the greatest experts say that my two-headed language has no relatives in the whole world. This fish is Basque.

Washing Up

They were doing the dishes, his wife washing while he dried. He’d washed the night before. Unlike most men he knew, he really pitched in on the housework.

The Breasts of Young Women

He tossed lines to the girls coming off the dancefloor the way some people feed pigeons, smiling, exuberant, as if the pigeons were really feeding him, or promising to. “Nice number ‘the A-train’.” “You’re looking good. I was watching.” He stood sideways so that he could play his black eyes over both the dancers and those waiting. Through the dancers I could see him talking, always talking, heroic line of his Clark Gable mustache rising and falling.

The Couple

She and Mrs. Lupin were on the Poing, and they watched the pair climbing from the Shell Beach — the man in front, his head bent a little forward by the climb, the child behind him, lugging a string bag.

Fear: Four Examples

My daughter called from college. She is a good student, excellent grades, is gifted in any number of ways.

Gazebo

That morning she pours Teacher’s over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window. I go, “Holly, this can’t continue. This has got to stop.”

Want to See Something?

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything else. But I had heard that. I tried to wake Cliff. But he was passed out. So I got up and went to the window. A big moon hung over the mountains that surrounded the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars. Easy enough to imagine a face there — eye sockets, nose, even the lips.

A Serious Talk

Vera’s car was there, no others, and Burt gave thanks for that. He pulled into the drive and stopped beside the pie he’d dropped last night. It was still there, the aluminum pan upside down, a halo of pumpkin filling on the pavement. It was Friday, almost noon, the day after Christmas.

Mother’s Day

This story is not currently avaible online.

Aeaea

The Three Virgins, they called us at Vassar. I don’t know, even now, if we were wise or foolish. But we’ve each seen something of life: one in New York, one in Chicago, and one in Beverly Hills. We meet up often enough, passing over this wide wilderness, to and from on the career trails, the marriage and separation trails, wandering from sacking and slaughter with our booty, from conquest and humiliations, wedding banquets and sanatoria, fatfarms, dude ranches and communes, islands en route, and adventures.

Dreaming Ninety Years

This story is not currently available online. I dreamed Ward Booth was speaking to me, telling me the whole story of his ninety years of life, and I stood somewhere in hot sun spotted with the broken shade of very …

This story is not currently available online. I dreamed Ward Booth was speaking to me, telling me the whole story of his ninety years of life, and I stood somewhere in hot sun spotted with the broken shade of very …

In the Old Country

1. Votaries (I)

Shortly before my eigteenth birthday, when my uncle learned how to crawl, thereby freeing me of my duties as a male nurse, I walked out into the night to find the Old Country.

’06

This story is available via the PDF link below. On Wednesday, Hunyadi Janos, vendor of pharmaceuticals, appeared at noon on the corner of 10th and Dockery.  In his hand-made cart there was stacked in place a fair selection of the …

The Wasps

This story is not currently available online. Some lively visitors to my sickroom in early summer were the wasps.  Certainly the stately, dashing appearance of the wasps befitted the forerunners of an active, prosperous season.  Even the melancholy sickroom seemed …

The Eye

Ten or twelve years ago there came to live in Tangier a man who would have done better to stay away.

Deja Vu

This story is not currently available online. There was a young woman in the department, Eve, whom no one knew well.  She was slightly older than the other students — twenty-six, twenty-seven.  Married, with a bachelor’s degree from an Eastern …

My Work in California

I. The Younger Factory

Of the one hundred passengers arriving from Seattle (Boeing) my job was only with thirty-four industrialists from Asia. Of this group a dozen were unexpectedly tall; a few wore dark, prescription glasses; only one man had two briefcases as carry-on. Not one delegate looked back at the aircraft or took a picture of the Oakland charter terminal.

Where Saturn Keeps the Years

You must see Helen Ward in her moment. It is that moment of blood and decision which makes her years of achievement, alas — which makes visible the ghastly halo she wears through her continuing service. She goes on, Helen, doing what she was trained to do. We are told she is one of the most respected pediatricians in Albany.