Fiction

Aidan was playing with rocks, playing with a boy and girl who had been in the water, unattended, when we arrived at the beach. The beach was otherwise deserted; no one had come for the brother and sister for the hour we had been there and so I kept an eye on all of them—my…

The morning after my husband’s vision of the end of the world, we picked up the show rabbits from Dubuque. An old college buddy was the only breeder in the tri-state area with the Dwarf Hotot. My son, Mason, had seen them in Rabbit Fancier and dreamed in spots and tiny bobbed ears for weeks. I couldn’t…

His rental bike was as big as mine, so I chose a more difficult path that wound into a deep valley a few miles from the campsite. The small, red guidebook said it was an advanced route. I insisted. Me, my wife, and my son. About an hour in, I became separated, hurt my foot….

And that was the year Sister Margaret became Meg. A decade after she left our village, after she renounced her membership with Mothers for Christ, she returned from the big city. Armed with a new name and a new age. “Life begins at forty” was the only thing she said when men asked her the…

Every morning in the hotel lobby, I saw the man: slim, professional-looking, with a bland attractiveness that should have made him instantly forgettable. And yet I found him compelling, oddly familiar, even. Energy crackled between us, unmistakable, an old feeling that returned to me with an unsettling pulse in my groin. I figured he must…

It was some years before I got up the courage to go to the truth café. But when finally I did, it took only a few weeks to convince one of the women in my life to join me. She and I stood outside the café in the midmorning, spring, in a line of other…

Her 8:30s are late, the first of the day. She waits out front, beneath the largest of the three dogwoods. It’s strange to be here, standing like this, pretending to have arrived a relative stranger to this house. But she’s been here her whole life, hasn’t she? Frosted branches hover and reach in the morning…

Restless, you find yourself in New York again. An unlikely place for your ghost to turn up, since during your time as a mortal, you were so unhappy here. Everyone knew it. Ten months and five social disasters later, you set sail for Spain, for Granada, vowing never to return to this godforsaken city. Yet,…

Mid-morning, mid-June, the sky thick with moisture, blanched milky as a cataract overhead, the horizons blurred, gone vague and unreliable. The tiered streetscape of apartment, office, and shop windows reflect the wet air back in an overlap of sodden drifts, the heat feeding upon itself as effectively as despair is said to, already over a…