Fiction

"You shouldn’t play with fire." Lena leans over Ivan’s shoulder and blows out the votive candle over which he is passing his index finger back and forth. She jiggles her arm nervously, and the silver bracelet slides beneath her sleeve. She looks around her. Everywhere there is plenty. The people are fat. How can some…

Lucy calls Greg up as soon as she gets to her office. She was the one who had to run, as soon as the teacher conference was over, who took off out of there like a bat out of hell, heading for her car, leaving Greg to walk more leisurely home, no doubt stopping on…

We have a grandfather somewhere. We don’t know where—I mean, we kiddos don’t. Not anymore. Mostly we remember him at the low house by the lake. Grousing at the black flies, stinking up Nature with the smell of his burning charcoal-and-plum pipe tobacco. A stout figure, like an orator in some senate, he liked to…

“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,…

Jackie Flynn just turned eleven, but he has already spent plenty of time inside the Knickerbocker, a dark smoky barroom where men with rulers in their back pockets drink beer and stare at a soundless TV. Whenever his father goes out to do what he calls "moonlighting," Jackie’s mother insists that Jackie accompany him. She…

Before they had ever lived in the house, somebody’s useless cow had sickened and died in the shed next door. The shaggy rope that tethered her still lay in a corner, so when Sonia figured out that her older sister, Goldie, was having to do with a boy, she got up in the night, disentangled…

The intervention is not Marilyn’s idea, but it might as well be. She is the one who has talked too much. And she has agreed to go along with it, nodding and murmuring an all right into the receiver while Sid dozes in front of the evening news. They love watching the news. Things are…

When I was young our winter-wear wouldn’t have permitted anyone to look sexy. The look then was like the inflated figures in a Macy’s parade, puffy and down-stuffed, colorful rubber boots, with pompons on the hats our mothers knitted, matching mittens hanging on yarn from our coat sleeves. Fashion then didn’t have in mind sprinting…

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…