Fiction

  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…

I decided that we were in the old firehouse after some kind of fire, undressing, and the feeling was the same old feeling, that is everyone wanted to get drunk, but we could not do that, so we undressed heavily and breathed heavily, each breath a full pint, and I sat on a stool beside…

In February, when the snow comes down hard, little globes of light are left along Route 23, not the side where the Arco station is, but on the other side, which slopes off when a driver least expects it. The lights are made out of paper bags and sand and candles, and they burn past…

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…

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…

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…