Fiction

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…

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…

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…