Fiction

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….

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,…

       Was toward the end of your shift, a Saturday, another one of those long slow lazy afternoons of summer—sun never burning through the clouds, clouds never breaking into rain—the odometer like a clock ticking all these bored little pent-up streets and mills and tenements away. The coffee shops, the liquor stores, laundromats, police, fire, gas…

       In a hospital in Kansas City, Stan Wachtel’s wife, Celia, was dying. Outside it was the middle of February, raw and blustery, but in her hospital room the air was thick and warm, perhaps heated by the glow of all the machines monitoring her bodily functions. Her heart, that wretched fist, pumped listlessly, as if…