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…

a novel excerpt Well OK, let’s see: start with the climactic moment and my father wearing his regulation State Trooper iridescent mirror shades so I could see a pair of shrunken images of myself but not his eyes and he stood there in the marl-paved parking lot beside his truck with the red light still…

A year after my father was called before the McCarthy subcommittee, the acne began to appear, and nothing I did prevented the blotches from rising and spreading like a small red army over my cheeks and chin. I tried calamine, witch hazel, all seven lotions from the pharmacy on Sixth Avenue, and finally a paste…

Katya is searching for her glasses. They were just here. One minute ago, on the counter, the big brown glasses. Without them, everything is waxy. She lays her hand on the cool Formica and makes a brushing motion. Keys, coffee mug, phone book. Two different pens. Why are there so many pens? She has never…

They’d been led to our land. The woman, Meredith, was far along in her pregnancy, and the coincidence of her name being close to “Mary” struck me, no place to lay their heads as they awaited the birth of their child. We-I-owned two hundred acres, cut out of the red rock along the Wyoming-Colorado border….