Fiction

  Louis liked the paddle more than the man who swung it. He respected the instruction, the ritual, the organization of his thoughts when the paddle struck its target. He enjoyed the stinging clarity, the expedient way the paddle transmitted its message. "You’re a bad boy, aren’t you? You’re Daddy’s little pig," the man with…

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…

Helen Swann shivers in shirtsleeves at the bus stop, coatless and confident the day will warm. The city bus, as it lumbers toward her, cracks the ice that lines the gutter. Frost nubs its broad, bald forehead and clouds the immense windshield. Like glaucoma, Helen thinks. It’s one of the old buses, which means the…

  [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…

The ashtray was given as a wedding present to the young couple who later grew unhappy and died, but that was not the fault of any inanimate object. Made from crystal cut into pleasing shapes, it was held aloft by the bride, Flora, the day after the wedding. Already she thought she could see the…

from Inheritance When she was thirty-four, no longer a young woman, my grandmother Chanyi crossed West Lake to see a fortuneteller. She didn’t tell my grandfather; she wished to keep her fate a secret. Perhaps her years of married life had deepened her need for privacy. “You come along, Junan,” she told my mother. “She’ll…