Fiction

I think the last time I saw you may have been that time near the church. I still like that church despite this, though the church is also other things to me. In fact, more and more I wish I remembered those other things that are called permanent, inviolable, impregnable to assault or trespass, secure…

As the lights go up, a man standing on a small platform facing stage right (an imaginary audience there) waves one more time at those people and turns and steps down toward us. He is dressed in an impeccably casual way: slacks and a sport coat, tie optional. Around his neck on a ribbon is…

A remote white moon was howling down with its man-in-the-moon mouth, and she swung out across the double yellow line to pass an ass-dragging old van—whose driver turned out to be the hero of the story—and we came face-to-face with a Ford pickup. I had time to read the F-O-R-D, time to reflect that the…

i. On the fourth month of the second year of the drought which brought so much despair to our community, the weatherman began to grow his beard. Inconsequential as it might seem to the rest of the world, no event in the annals of our town has been more contentious—except, of course, for the weatherman’s…

The neighborhood got its first dose of Qamar the summer of her ninth birthday, when she sat on the rooftop of her Alexandria apartment building for ten days and waited for the moon to come down. She did it for her neighbor Metwalli; he promised he’d be hers forever if she only brought him the…

Flicking her IV line out of the way with the same movement she would use to shoo a fly, Maria Crowley opens the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Catalogue while the new visiting nurse makes herself at home. This one’s name is Corrine, or maybe it is Doreen; she wears Spandex and polyester in icy greens…

". . . moths hear sounds through their wings." "Moths require only three things to survive and breed: food, shade, and privacy." "Moths don’t eat wool . . . Only the larval form of the moths are wool eaters." There are over ten thousand five hundred identified species of moths in North America alone. When…

  First, her name was Jane, and if that wasn’t bad enough, one day, while she was sitting in the dining hall and drawing her trademark Jews—tiny cartoon men with beards and wisdom who decorated the edge of all her notebooks—the men got up off the page, shimmied down a table leg, and bused her…

  [postcard text] I am awfully fond of this garden. How pretty are those plants & flowers! There is a grotto in this garden I was afraid to enter as it is too dark there, but at last decided. It is full of passages, the water runs over the walls outside. With best wishes Yours…