Fiction

This is the latching on. You are shelter and source, and this is the smell of only you. The hands that hold and lift and swaddle, the mouth that smiles and sings me, the eyes that look me into being: yours. This is the skin to skin. I cry to make the hungry stop and…

It was a job Gary stumbled into while he was already gainfully employed as a CPA in Spoonington, Indiana. He and Dinah were at a dinner party at the home of one of her colleagues. Dinah was a lawyer who’d kept her own name. “Even if I did believe in taking another person’s name,” she’d…

Trevor’s father said to go on and get in the Suburban with Jean and her kids. Trevor balked and his sister Lesley-Ann acted like she wouldn’t even be able to cross the yard unless he came with her. Trevor’s father told him again to go on, and Trevor did. Halfway across the yard he could…

Gray skies. A silver tray of individually wrapped cheeses. Bad coffee in boardrooms. That was Prague to me, that “city of a hundred spires.” And I might have boarded the plane knowing nothing more had Antonin not turned to me during that final dinner and said, “If you are free tomorrow, perhaps we go on…

No one was having a good day. It was December in Minnesota and we were all at a stage in our lives where our therapist thought we might be less loserlike if we met late Monday morning. Late morning because early morning wasn’t an option for some of us—because some of us couldn’t keep ourselves…

We fight about her birth control pills, for one thing. They cost about twenty dollars, and Tamara wants me to buy them, and that is something she has wanted for some time. At Planned Parenthood, they have my name on a form, she tells me. She writes down the address and sticks it in my…