Fiction

Child Widow

“Quick weddings and short marriages are all I know,” I admitted in my interview at June’s Brides, “but I love lace, and I’m capable of telling white lies to brides’ mothers. I was a psych minor, so I know everything is harder than it looks.” I got the job. And for the next few years,…

Tripped Oasis

I begin to see the possibilities in dehydration just about now. Dehydration-a tantalizing word. Fog without moisture, space without stars or solar magnificence. Somewhere hidden are heaps of stone our guide found last week and, in our group’s wandering about, lost again. An effluvium of dust has hung over us for two months now, almost…

The Garden

When Pia walks into his flat in Bombay, she thinks it’s a joke. She looks up at Adil, the man she has agreed to marry, waiting for him to ask the rightful occupant of this miniature box to step out of his hiding place. "So what do you think?" he says, mistaking her smile for…

Companion Animal

When his wife told him to get out of the house that had been hers, anyway, long before they were married, Valdek Moore looked in the paper and found a semi-furnished one-bedroom at Linden Pines. The development’s name suggested an estate of elegant foliage, right for a term of penance, when it was really a…

Elephant Feelings

1. Topsy, needy This is about an elephant, electrocuted one hundred years ago. Her name was Topsy, and she was famous at a time when people were still amazed by an elephant. Plus she did tricks. She could stand on her back legs, raising her front legs, wearing a gauze tutu. She was a star…

World Series, 1979

Dad, Todd, Mal, and me are sitting in the positions I’ve assigned us, and the Mormon Tabernacle Boring is singing the National Anthem really slowly. After forever, we all put our Orioles caps back on as the Pirates take the field, and it’s showtime. My palms are sweating. Mom comes in. “Uh-oh,” I say, not…

Before Long

In the days that summer when his mother had to work cleaning the cottages in Dáchenko and Kóslan, Anton was being watched by the Shurins. He was twelve and blind, and his mother feared leaving him alone. He spent his mornings working with Oleg Shurin in the tomato patches along the bluff, and in the…

Lightning Over the Lake

The setting is a sleepaway camp nestled at the foot of the Green Mountains in Vermont. The camp’s entrance is flanked by twin totem poles stenciled up and down with crudely carved letters that spell the name of the place: indian acres. Drive through the gate, and trails fork out to archery ranges, a dining…