Fiction

Her 8:30s are late, the first of the day. She waits out front, beneath the largest of the three dogwoods. It’s strange to be here, standing like this, pretending to have arrived a relative stranger to this house. But she’s been here her whole life, hasn’t she? Frosted branches hover and reach in the morning…

Restless, you find yourself in New York again. An unlikely place for your ghost to turn up, since during your time as a mortal, you were so unhappy here. Everyone knew it. Ten months and five social disasters later, you set sail for Spain, for Granada, vowing never to return to this godforsaken city. Yet,…

Mid-morning, mid-June, the sky thick with moisture, blanched milky as a cataract overhead, the horizons blurred, gone vague and unreliable. The tiered streetscape of apartment, office, and shop windows reflect the wet air back in an overlap of sodden drifts, the heat feeding upon itself as effectively as despair is said to, already over a…

The man they call her husband never married her and never asked about what she left behind in the old country—what or who. It does not matter. The past is behind her, across the Atlantic. Less than a week on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires, then a steamboat up the river to the landlocked…

They called her Little though she wasn’t anymore. She resembled her father, red-haired and tall. As a kid she’d been the one who hauled with him when his sternman didn’t show. Lobstering was a franker education than what she got at school. If you weren’t in the present, it came and found you. A bloodied…

The Local History project was a partner situation, and Oren was not surprised when he got Imogene Fraser. She was Mr. Serwer’s trusted ambassador, and he, the new student, was treated like a lost diplomat who barely spoke the language. They pulled topics out of a tupperware. Imogene let him do it, and he picked…

The HerbariumMay 1942 The greenhouse shimmers like a glass cathedral. A cedar waxwing alights from a nearby Oregon grape licked by flames of fern. The bird sails to the tip of the greenhouse’s back A, a lemon-bellied wick on a giant’s sunlit candle. Some of its feathers are dipped in red as if to seal a…

The Premise I had graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from a fine Ivy League university, and I was looking for a job. The bills were piled on the right-hand side of my desk, and the ads for employment positions on the left-hand side. The bill pile was higher by a…

Her sister loved pepper on everything. Just a little bit more, she’d say, while the waiter stood there, resentful and impatient, twisting the cumbersome wooden mill over and over again, waiting to be released. For Anna, pepper was a take-it-or-leave it spice. Anna loved salt. She loved everything about it: its purity, its texture—the way…