Fiction

My aunt Leticia could be counted on to explain the family mysteries. She’d forget I didn’t know something and drop it into conversation, or use the occasion of having a fever—or being ill in any way—to let down her defenses and tell me things I hadn’t been told. Sometimes the words flew out of her…

There were a bunch of us who had drawn together into a corner of the dining room. It was a big party, and none of us had met before. But a tiny core of women of a certain age had drawn more women until there were enough of us that we needed to be democratic…

The shepherd is perched on a stile, one eye on his paper, one eye on the lane below the ffridd, the meadow, beyond the flock. His dogs lie at his feet, their heads between their paws, panting softly in the unseasonably warm May weather and batting their ears occasionally at the horseflies attracted to the…

Andrew Byar began his experiment in the garden, going out in the dusky evenings after the help had dispersed for the day, after the cook had served the last meal and washed the china and departed to catch the final trolley, after the gardener had arranged the tools in a gleaming, orderly progression against the…

So all right, thought Peterson, he was speaking English, and, all right, so the map was from America. Well, naturally. And so, all right, the names of towns were spelled differently here and pronounced differently. But come on, hadn’t this country been open to tourism for at least ten years? "C-h-i-n-k-o," said Peterson, pronouncing the…

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…

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…

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…

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…