Fiction

from The Swank Hotel There was a girl, way back, who was going to become the patron saint of the mentally ill and their caretakers. The girl loved her father, and her priest loved her in a fatherly way. Her father, the petty king of Oriel, loved his queen. To him, the queen was perfect,…

Gneshel liked Rabbi Spitz right from the start. He reminded her of a frog. Though he was eight inches shorter than her, had a lazy eye and a metastasizing bald patch, she liked him. Experience had taught her that he was unlikely to reciprocate the feeling. Orange juice and autumn leaves should taste the same,…

I’m mopping the floor when he walks in, the future 42nd President of the United States. A little bell clangs, and a gust of wind fills the shop, as if—at the sight of the southern Governor who appeared on 60 Minutes just the week before, the candidate whose campaign is ablaze with celebrity and scandal—the…

At fifty-three, there is an ungainly weight to Dr. Elijah Crutcher’s body, a lack of spontaneity that he feels in his thighs as he goes up, up dark steps, following his young lover’s angry flight. She is twenty-eight. Moments ago, at the art reception beneath, she laughed effusively with the gallery host, the curator, a…

Kei wears everything he needs to look the part: sunglasses, even when the sky is darkening; a black suit, the sort most people only wear to Buddhist funerals, with a pack of Hopes visible in the breast pocket. He never takes off his coat, no matter the season, and when the occasion presents itself, Kei…

He started in Calais, rolling his scooter off the ferry as the sun came up, not exactly looking forward to the thirteen hours he estimated were ahead of him but eager to see Allabella at the end of his ride. By lunchtime his ass was numb and he was bone-shivered and weary but his heart…

The lights come up on the office of DR. GEORGE FROBISHER, a psychiatrist. The office is pleasantly and expensively furnished. FROBISHER is in his late fifties or early sixties, a handsome man with swept-back white hair. He’s wearing slacks and a nice sport coat, no tie. He sits at his desk (stage left), making notes….

“They think I’m a fraud.” “They think I’m a fraud.” I like to repeat this to myself in the mirror before I go out and do my job. It might seem weird to say something cruel right before I perform, but I thrive on the self-doubt. If I go out there feeling too confident, then…

In the field behind Scoop’s house was an abandoned Pontiac Firebird and inside this Firebird was a three-foot-long rat snake, and I said, “Kill it,” but Scoop said no, that was bad luck, what had the snake ever done to us, and using a branch, he wrangled it from the driver’s seat. “The King of…