Fiction

  When do you begin traveling? When your airplane lifts off the ground? When you leave your house for the road? When you pack? When the plan first comes to mind? When you admit to how restless and ill at ease, even murderous, you feel at home? When you take your first steps? When you…

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….

  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…

They moved into Silver Glade with a brand new baby, unnamed, although the grandparents had it registered for high school as Clementine Wrentham Farmer. Wrentham was their name and Farmer was the name their daughter, Lina, used when writing the check for the house. Her professional name, to their joy, was still Lina Rose Wrentham….

Wyatt Ingalls and Esther Markham had separately been hired to bid at auction on Church Owl. They had never met. Their assigned seats were next to each other. The auctioneer, Reginald Avery, had just said, "—splendid Church Owl." From the auctioneer’s right, a tall woman of age twenty-two, with an aurora of dark red hair,…

It was through our friend Shirley that we met the Kalowski boys. I was eleven that summer, and my sister, Lila, was thirteen. Shirley used to live in the hollow down below us, but had recently moved up the road, where the houses were more populous, closer to the hard road and the still faraway…