Hovering in the air were two luminous shapes. They turned, balanced in a pose of surrender. Water poured out into the lower world, through channels unsolved by busy rats, tides, and fish. Then a phrase of music is misheard, and the green Orpheus descends, striking the prison bars of the sky like a lyre as…
The bloom was off the economic recovery. “I just want to know one thing,” she said. What was that one thing? He’ll never know, Because at just that moment he heard the sound Of broken glass in the bathroom, and when he got there, It was dark. His hand went to the wall But the…
for Hermann Michaeli On the day the balls disappeared, men playing soccer suddenly looked like crazy people chasing invisible rabbits through the short grass. Men playing baseball became more clearly what they’d always been: bored teenagers waiting around for something to happen. Spectators, at home and in the stands, believed they were being jerked around…
Your husband’s laugh, a glass of grenadine. You greet the guests, steer coats onto your arms. Ice rattles the kitchen: he’s mixing drinks. You stand where you can keep an eye on him. One measured glance at me, your face a smooth storm, and I know whatever I’d say—vague murmurings in one…
June 1973 Early on the morning of Alice’s wedding, when I was nine, I woke to hear the front door slamming into the quiet, and I got out of my bed and went to the window. Standing on tiptoes, feet bare against floor planks chilled by the air conditioner, the breeze running up my…
Myth has it that Ann Beattie published her first short story in The New Yorker when she was twenty-five years old,signed a first-read contract with them, and thereafter made five to seven annual appearances in the venerable magazine — with stories she would write in one sitting, in one afternoon. As myths go, this one…
Finding things had always been her greatest pleasure. She was not systematic, not one of the ones who bought the local paper and mapped out a route between all of Saturday’s yard sales. What she loved was driving down the road and coming upon the sign-a rough paper bag tacked to a telephone pole, or…
for my sister Madeline Then you’ve forgotten how we couldn’t wait for the bulldozers to raze that house on Ridge Road. At the fresh edge they’d butted into the woods, the machines sat stalled for days, reluctant to finish up the job. The goldfish pond had already dried down to its beer cans when our…
Jen and I were driving through New Mexico with her father, who was a retired insurance guy just a few years older than me, a tall, thin guy with a swatch of white hair that slipped across his scalp as if it had fallen there from a tree. Jen thought this trip would be a…
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