Fiction

The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness:   TIME SAFARI, INC. SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST. YOU NAME THE ANIMAL. WE TAKE YOU THERE. YOU SHOOT IT.   A…

She loved him best in the wintertime, on those mornings when it was so cold that crystalline spores of frost could be seen in their glinting conquest over every smooth surface. Winter was the only time of year when the world might properly stop, and morning in its stillness could morph into an equally silent…

“Every animal has just enough brain to preserve its own hide.”   In the backyard of our first house, the roots of the sod we laid wouldn’t take. The front, when we moved in that spring, was fine if a little weedy, but the back was thatched up with the dead: long overgrown and run…

Theirs was a landlocked tribe, generations deep: ghettoed in the old country, urban in the new one, smart, klutzy red-haired Jews of the Ashkenazi type, and not a fisherman in the lot, until we get to Lily’s father. Chicago-born-and-raised, he begged a pal to take him to a lake, and next thing you know, there…

It is never completely quiet in Gilot. The UN tents crowding the hillsides up here are thin as air and swelter in the night heat, dense with the smell of urine and bodies. Before sunrise, you can hear babies crying down in the ravine (especially Lovely’s baby, who is sickly) and tin pots rattling around,…

In spite of what the radio told us, we knew Berlin was likely lost by the time the cherry blossoms opened. That was when the dead women began appearing beside the Landwehrkanal. Once a week we found them sprawled as though sunbathing next to that bottle-green water. But while I’ve seen many reactions—quick grimaces, the…

It takes time to learn how the ink bleeds. He would think of a theme—his grandfather’s oxen returning from the granary in a summer rain—and take out the inkstick. Once as long as the blade of his pocketknife, the stick was now just a nub, not much bigger than his knuckle. It was actually a…

Margaretta was sitting on the topmost step of her front porch, in a faded pastel-colored sundress, barefoot, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands—lost in thought, I surmised—when I first went to see her. Her husband was in the front yard, his hands on his hips, surveying the sky, where dark rain clouds were…