Fiction

Stop

Outside the city, lights flash in his rearview mirror. The police car pulls ahead of him and he stops behind it. The white cop emerges and looks angry. Or happy and content. It would not matter. The motorist of color freezes. He tries to avoid the appearance of carrying anything, or of raising his hands….

Immediate Family

Madeline Voltaire (1946–present)   She was an only child, adored by her mother and father, but she was lonely and she vowed, when she married, to have as many children as her body would allow. Madeline had long black hair, so long she could sit on it or wear it piled in thick curls atop…

Mauro and Elena

It’s only six months, the social worker told Mauro. Then you’ll have your daughter home. She said there were far worse places they could send a girl convicted of such a crime. She described the compound as being like a summer camp, a small boarding school in the campo, a retreat even if operated by…

Doorway to Darkness

When I finally returned to Southern California, I expected to find the locals in the grips of apocalyptic fear, arming themselves and venturing out from fortified homes only for the most necessary provisions. The area had recently suffered a brutal terrorist attack, during which over a dozen people were gunned down while attending a retirement…

Some of You

Some of you walked as though you were walking on coals of fire. Some of you as though in the field of arboles you remembered from when you were younger, when your fathers taught you how to pull the chilis from the stem, though there were no stems and you were on lookout for other…

Big Sister

Tongues started wagging after Nazan Abla, our next-door neighbor’s daughter, was hospitalized for a week. I heard her mother tell my mother through the kitchen window that she had a bleeding ulcer. But the real gossip started after her hospital stay. In the year that followed, she broke up with her fiancé, took a job…

A Private River

Excerpt from Fellowship Point   Dick thought he’d drive to the prison himself. His wife, Polly, couldn’t do it. Doctor’s orders. She wasn’t to drive until the cast came off. Annoying. Exasperating! He had to wait until he could slip away. If she caught him, she’d keep him from going. In the meantime, he watched…