Fiction

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…

       They glowed, the first day after their wedding, like planets in the morning sky, and their movements, no matter the task—packing gifts, choosing deli sandwiches, examining the map—were stately and serene.        The second day, in the car, she said she was homesick. For their wedding, of all things. "It went too fast." He lifted a…

       The light in the morning made him happy. It was one of the few things that did now. It arrived discreetly filtered, not to disturb him, then poured in when Pablino came to open the shutters, lighting up the dark corners and bleaching the embroidery on the nineteenth-century bench at the foot of the bed….

October        Another night in the hospital and nothing makes sense to you but that yellow-eyed cat, seething, slobbering, Ahab-mad, nightly one a.m., TV38. You are stuck in bed on an intravenous paralytic, so many sites blown, bruised to hell, the nurses have had to work their way up one arm and down another, all of…

The house where I grew up burned about thirty years ago. It was situated a few miles north of Loring, near the intersection of two country roads, only one of which was paved when I was a boy. The one we lived on wasn’t, and my dad considered it a major triumph when he managed…