In the summer, your father starts taking in the strays. First come Pete and Jane. They’re from Texarcana and they’re spending a week at the El San Juan Hotel. When they walk into the Trolley, they sit next to your father. “This is paradise,” Pete says. He lifts his drink. “You, my friend, have got…
1. At first the women disagree over the saltshakers and peppermills and then the cookware and finally the utensils, until the bickering gives way to full-throated arguments and one stupendous scream-fest. When Miriam bursts into tears, Tamara follows suit. Within moments the two women fall into each other’s arms apologizing, consoling, and vowing never to…
1. IN WHICH MY TRUE HEAD MAKES AN APPEARANCE When your best friend smashes fluorescent light tubes across your chest, because you asked him to, because you thought it might mean something, because you need to mean something, and you bleed into a water tank while smart people watch and analyze, and the smart people…
It was too late when I was called in, but it was probably always too late, which is to say there was really never any hope. People didn’t want to believe that—even some of the people who were closest to Beth, maybe them most of all. They would ask me for a long time after…
In fiction, our winner is Tomiko M. Breland, for her story “Rosalee Carrasco.” Ploughshares’ fiction editor Margot Livesey writes: “In the elegantly structured ‘Rosalee Carrasco,’ Tomiko Breland describes the before and after, as well as the actual events, of a very particular day at middle school. The voice is elegant, empathetic, and vivid without…
She was wiping the counter down for closing when he came and seated himself on a stool, asking for pie and coffee. There was nothing special about that, nothing special about him. He was in working clothes, a heavy cloth jacket, gray to begin with, and blackened now at the elbows and cuffs. He didn’t…
Anna is in the orchard wearing a sleeveless housecoat, lifting a stone from the Roman road discovered a few feet away. It was unearthed a week ago during the gas line extension to Taranto. The stone fits a low wall in the garden she’s planted with nightshades—eggplant, tomatoes, firecracker red peperoncini hot peppers whose oil…
for L.S.K.V. “I’m gonna kill you,” Gina says in my ear as our camp counselor, Eunice, shows us around. “Tonight, in your sleep. If I haven’t killed myself first.” I shrug Gina off. “It’s one week. We’ll survive.” Secretly, though, I’m dying inside. Nothing I’ve read or seen on TV ever suggested that US summer…
Chicago, 1960 In the big old Nordling house near the university, at the far end of the long, tall living room, there was a baby grand piano. The piano was next to an open window with gauze curtains that almost reached the floor. Astrid Nordling was standing behind them, hiding from the grown-ups sitting over…
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