Fiction

I read in The New York Times where Luis Alvarez, professor of physics at Berkeley, did this experiment wherein he thought Kennedy's head was much like a melon. Now this Luis Alvarez did win the Nobel Prize and he did invent detonators for the atomic bomb and he did watch same bomb, nickname: Little Boy,…

Margaret Many Wounds was dying. Three years earlier she had been diagnosed as diabetic, and now, although she felt her health rapidly declining, she refused to go to the hospital. "I am old anyway," she told her relatives. "Leave me be." Early one morning she called to her daughter: "Let me have a mirror." Lydia…

When I was a boy, my grandmother clutched my chin and said, "Promise me one thing. That you'll never let that mother of yours buy a Mercedes." I promised. It was easy. There was no chance of our buying anything. We filled out sweepstakes for an hour every night that we sent away with stamps…

Next year, writing his personal experience essay to convince admissions at Penn he's Ivy League material despite uneven grades, he'll describe in amusing detail the one baseball game his father took him to, and get in on a scholarship despite his father's explicit pessimism. And he'll do well, though he's not as brilliant as his…

They always meet us at the door and search what we're carrying, before we can go in. It's the same for everybody -routine-but it makes me feel guilty. As if they think we'd be trying to smuggle in something dangerous. The thing is, we don't even realize sometimes, my wife and I. What counts as…

When I saw the sign for piglets I told my father to stop the car. "I want to buy one," I said, attempting to say this with conviction. The thought of raising a pig over the summer had come as suddenly as the sign. "How are you going to raise a pig when you're so…

Translated from Greek by Martin McKinsey She had always said, "When I die, if my Angel comes and takes me for a last look at all the places I've ever lived in or been to, it won't take him more than a couple of minutes." In other words, that's how sheltered and paltry her life…

I The lemon tree splatters a lacy shadow over the hot grass. A main bough gave out five years ago under the weight of fruit the size of croquet balls, which should have been picked but wasn't (there are just so many things you can do with lemons). The scar from the missing limb is…

Wyman knows the girl is awake because he hears her finger nails clicking on the passenger-side window, keeping measures of the music that comes through the radio. He wants to glance at her, but is nervous about taking his eyes off the road in the dark. Audra Barranco, she said her name is. He loves…