Fiction

    For what did one raise these children? For what did one labor and heave and suffer reconstructive surgery; for what did one feed and clothe and coax and school, raising them from sitting to standing to making their own money, if not for their well-deserved gratitude? It was work, it was a lot…

The man I learn from drives us from carnival to carnival in a Chrysler hearse with a convertible top. In Futura Bold, it says Theobold’s Body Shop. He is a man in his mid-forties—trousers, all of expensive cotton; shirts of silk. He has a different pair of soft-leather boots for every day of the month….

On her first day at the American school, Glynnis’s class dissects earthworms. At her old school, the fourth graders dissected cow eyes that came delivered in a plastic jug. But here, the worms aren’t delivered. After lunch, the class has to find their own worms in the mud outside, then rinse them off under the…

There was a storm— Nearly seven years ago— Julia and Lucas, living in California, they didn’t live together. She lived in her space, he in his. Lucas was finishing a degree at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, biding time; they were going to move to L.A. soon and get a place together. She was…

  Once again, as we always do on weekdays now, after the nearly successful kitchen makeover soon-to-be-featured on a television station near you through all the lines and waves propagated by satellites and repeaters somewhere (I can’t tell you which station it will be on just yet—there are clauses in the contract that prohibit us…

In September of 1965, when I was eighteen years old, I traveled from London, England, where I was living, to Hamburg, West Germany, with my friend Carl Jurgen Kurtz. Carl was twenty. We’d met at a boarding house in Chelsea I’d lived in for a few weeks after I’d first arrived in London, and where…

  "Do be sure, dearie, that you get the plain yogurt for your father. I brought home vanilla by mistake last week, and he was ready to call out the constabulary." "Entendu," Eleanor called back, straightening her collar in front of the spotted mirror in the hall. How like her mother to use the phrase…

Maybe it had been raining for years. By the second night, it was easy to feel that way. They had come to this spot, in the heart of Panama, two days ago, and even then it had been raining. There was no sign of respite. It was as if they had come to a different…

  They drove the eighty-eight miles from Elgin up to Lake Delavan on cruise control without saying more than a few tight, courteous words. Marion had been experimenting with reticence lately. Though she had told Arnie not to take it personally, he found it hard not to add this to his list of other worries….