Fiction

Jeannie has never met Alice, and yet she knows Alice. She knows that Alice is here on a study abroad course that her parents think is a waste of time. She knows what Alice likes (iced coffee, cozy mysteries) and dislikes (driving, social media). She knows that Alice comes from the Swettenham tobacco family. She…

“It’s a dying art, you know.” Leopold says this to me as I am chopping up the chicken for the lions. I just grunt. I don’t see anything artistic about chopping up one hundred and fifty pounds of dead birds for three giant cats that always look at me like they are wondering what I…

1. She angled the camera for what she called the money shot: two attic eyebrow windows and a nose-shaped balcony off the second-floor master. If we squinted from the driveway, we could make out the mouth, the Dutch breakfast door that cut you in half at the stomach. The face of evil, the mother said, laughing, rubbing…

The pilot was talking about the most recent sighting of the wild man in the park. A dentist and her daughter had glimpsed him while on a camping trip. This glimpse had been fleeting and, mercifully, at a distance. He’d apparently not been wearing any pants. “No pants,” I said. “That’s right,” said the pilot….

Alex’s alley was better lit than the street. When she’d moved to San Diego several years before, Alex had started going for walks in the twilight hours, when the sun was dipping behind the trees but before it got too dark. In Chicago, she’d preferred to walk at night, when people were home from work…

Bants and I sit with the terriermen at The Bird in Hand pub on the eve of the trail hunt. It is Bants who wants to speak to them, but he will soon find out that terriermen are bad news. We squeeze ourselves, locally brewed beer in hand, around the corner table. The invitation is…

Aidan was playing with rocks, playing with a boy and girl who had been in the water, unattended, when we arrived at the beach. The beach was otherwise deserted; no one had come for the brother and sister for the hour we had been there and so I kept an eye on all of them—my…

The morning after my husband’s vision of the end of the world, we picked up the show rabbits from Dubuque. An old college buddy was the only breeder in the tri-state area with the Dwarf Hotot. My son, Mason, had seen them in Rabbit Fancier and dreamed in spots and tiny bobbed ears for weeks. I couldn’t…

His rental bike was as big as mine, so I chose a more difficult path that wound into a deep valley a few miles from the campsite. The small, red guidebook said it was an advanced route. I insisted. Me, my wife, and my son. About an hour in, I became separated, hurt my foot….