Fiction

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…

I have never, but for that first night with Vivienne, vomited in the back of a taxi. Vivienne moved into what had been my brother Ethan’s room in my rent-controlled apartment in New York. I firmly believe rent-control laws prohibit gainfully employed art gallery assistants and copy editors and salesgirls at Banana Republic from living…

The rain is making this rented tuxedo smell like a wet animal. My sister Rachel and my ex-girlfriend Maggie are standing outside the car while drops fall lightly on their newly done hair and their pink satin bridesmaids dresses. They’re looking at me like I should be unlocking the car, not staring at it from…

They lived in Tennessee for five months. George had wanted to move there to play guitar, an idea he seized on late one night, in the hopeful, dreamy fog of too much youth and too many beers. When promise is like a drug, the stars are supernatural, water is glass. There, in the bedroom, he…

Once there was a woman who was asked by a stranger to carry a foreign object with her onto a plane: When the stranger approached her, the woman was sitting at the edge of her chair a few feet from the gate out of which her plane was scheduled to leave. Her legs were crossed….

Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them, or lead them to very clearly marked sections (if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?) while they complained that nothing was arranged by title….

Olivia Alcuaz set down platters of spaghetti, tortillas, tomato and cucumber salad. She sat, lifted her chest as if she were in posture class, and launched into a tale about her cousin Enrique. Enrique had been driving down from Mexico when there were reports of a terrible crash involving a white car. Enrique’s car was…

  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…