Fiction

Of nearness to her sundered Things* A coral necklace, white, with a gold clasp. We had always thought coral was pink, but no, this coral is the color of egg shells. The beads are round, like pearls, and in size grow from the size of a pea to twice that where they must have hung…

"To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance." —G. K. Chesterton   Before the Flood, before the Hurricane, before the Twin Towers crumpled to dust and the glaciers thawed and the world picked up its heretofore plodding pace toward Doom…before BlackBerries, before iPods, before that…

She had lived in the best cities of the United States and Europe, in the best times, but at age fifty-eight, she’d ended up near a small college town in western New York State that was so rural there were more coyotes than people. And so poor that between the two, the coyotes were the…

From this point forward, Regina would bow to the gods of arbitrariness, kneel to whim, capitulate to kismet.    From this point: after years (two to seven, depending how you calculated their separations) of not being sure if he wanted to be married, teetering on the fence for so long it seemed he was stuck…

Old Zhang, the security guard at a government housing complex, was about to leave his room to lock the wrought-iron gate when he heard a heavy, yet muffled thud from outside. He rushed out, guessing that a flower pot had dropped from an apartment above, a not-uncommon accident because many families liked to grow flowers…

The BLM auction took place at the county fair. In the corner of the world stood five sorry-ass enclosures with about twenty or thirty animals inside—mostly horses, but then a few burros, too, carted over from Yuma. It would be my horse, technically. I was just going to keep it at the Arizona School for…

The summer school boys wore coats and ties, even in the heat. They were the irreverent children of suburban lawyers, of diplomats, of hopeful scientists working in the big federally funded labs outside of the city. When their parents dropped them off at the top of the school’s long drive, the boys’ required coats were…

It was only because he liked to sketch that he noticed it at all. Spring was late and there were still large patches of snow; as he rode along he noted the contrast, light and dark, the shapes and mounds, the texture. That’s all he was thinking when his horse snorted once, the air from…

Café You was more than a coffee house, more than the campus hangout. More than a dungeonesque door, a sunken room, and sofas leaking white stuffing, as if mice tunneled in the cushions while customers chatted overhead. It was more than a refuge when winter made life miserable. It was magnetic. Each roasted coffee bean,…