Fiction

The air outside was warm and wet, like breath. Feeling the breeze on his face, the baby stopped crying and looked up at the sky. I turned him around and leaned him against my chest, holding him with one hand curled under his arms, the other cupping his bottom. He gently kicked his legs, as…

Mandy stood in front of the open garage and asked her husband why anybody would ask her over for lunch on a Sunday. Dan was already moving the bicycles, hanging the rakes on a hook, stacking things she didn’t recognize. Maybe this woman wanted to get to know her, be her friend, he said, rolling…

It all started when Sophie came home from college, between her sophomore and junior years. She wasn’t happy to be back. She’d grown to love Boston, the sad blustery winters, the confusing one-ways and roundabouts, and she felt like she’d outgrown California—its sunny, childlike happiness. Worst of all was her mother. Sophie was an only…

Chicago Stories Alewives The year the alewives were washing up on the shores of the lake and their stench rose up from the beaches so that even when you couldn’t smell them anymore they stank up your memory. Newly dead they were a silvery blue. In the sun they were like hundreds of mirrors. They…

Mackey Conlon didn’t believe in God or science. She believed in patterns in the world you had to be sharp enough to catch. Feelings you had to be open enough to feel. She wasn’t one of those crunchy freaks; she just believed in the ability to see things for yourself. Who else was going to…

   Good-looking husky guy six-foot-four in late twenties or early thirties, Caucasian male, as the initial police report will note, he’s solid-built as a fire hydrant, carries himself like an athlete, or an ex-athlete just perceptibly thickening at the waist, otherwise in terrific condition like a bronze figure in motion, sinewy arms pumping as he…

  Two and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958, the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fairweather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now…

"Just in time for cocktails!" our mother’s mother, Gran, says, obviously exasperated, coming to meet us out on the drive. We were supposed to be there for lunch. Now, dressed in her cocktail clothes—white pants, a silk smock, gold shoes, and jewelry—after perfunctory kisses hello (she’s irritated) and the quickest sizing up of our mother’s…

When Anna Green walked into the ballroom for the twentieth reunion of Surfview High in Los Angeles, she did not predict that she would fall in love with Warren Vance. She joined her classmates, in their finery, penned by the hotel"s large glass windows, the sky outside black and the cars on the freeways arranged…