Fiction

  Marie parks in the circular drive where the front lawn had been grass the summer before. But nothing so beautiful, nothing so inherently good, about grass. The paving job was done by her cousin William’s own company, which he’d started after deciding it was too difficult to make a living as a fisherman. Hippie-ish…

Mason Salisbury and his son, Moreau, were hunting by Little Sandy Creek several miles from where the stream ran through town and powered the Salisbury mill. Father and son carried old fowling pieces and hadn’t brought the dogs; they weren’t hunting so much as talking. Moreau was home from seminary in Cazenovia. He hadn’t wanted…

Maybe the whole thing could be accounted for by the year, 1971: how we—well, I—woke at three in the morning with a funny sensation that something, somebody, was missing, and wandered out to the living room where my childhood sweetheart, the love-of-my-life Richie, was supposed to be sleeping on the couch. He was gone. He…

Rachel was the one who delivered the message. In the middle of dinner, she remembered the phone call, stood up, tossed her braid over her shoulder, and dug in her pocket for a scrap of paper. "Mom," then she looked warily at her father, "Dad, the prison called again today." She squinted at her eight-year-old…

Kaufman drove from one fire to another. In Baltimore, there had been a train wreck in the Howard Street tunnel, the northern end of which was not far from the small house he owned, tucked away on a side street behind the hulking wreck of a Victorian hotel, and three doors down from a gay…

He had jumped a radio tower and a cliff in Norway, but never a bridge. He chose a Wednesday morning when the fog was expected to burn off early and called in sick to work. At dawn, he climbed the tower. The riskiest part, he thought, would be landing in the water, where his friends…

The crusade had been brewed up over empty stomachs and ulcer bomb margaritas made from reconstituted lime juice and ice cubes older than the tequila. Bob’s tequila-idea plan was simple: He—we—would become minor anecdotes by driving to El Paso, Texas, finding Cormac McCarthy at the pool table, challenging him to a game of eight-ball, beating…

The cousins made a rough crossing, they’d have said, if they had thought to complain. They mentioned but didn’t lament the time in the air, the late arrival at De Gaulle, the bus ride to catch the train at the Gare Montparnasse, or the long wait for the Très Grand Vitesse to Bordeaux. They did…

One day I get tired of crying and feeling sorry for myself—I’m not starving, I’m not in a war, I’m not crippled—and decide to track down my real father’s phone number. Isn’t it about time? I’m practically thirty years old. This is my life, right now. I call Cleveland information. I don’t know why I’m…