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The Sea Latch
April 16, 2013
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
April 16, 2013
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
April 16, 2013
by Rachel Yoder
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
February 12, 2013
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
February 12, 2013
by Joe Davies
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
February 12, 2013
by Dave Kim
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
December 10, 2012
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
December 10, 2012
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
December 10, 2012
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
December 10, 2012
by John Clayton
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
July 24, 2012
by Leslie Parry
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
July 24, 2012
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
July 24, 2012
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
July 24, 2012
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
May 10, 2012
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.
Wildflowers of the Western Chaparral
January 6, 2012
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
January 6, 2012
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
January 6, 2012
by Kent Nelson
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
January 6, 2012
by Mia Alvar
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
December 6, 2011
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
November 27, 2011
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
November 15, 2011
by
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
October 22, 2011
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.