Fiction

We were sipping grappa, watching The Tragic Stiletto of Trabzon on an old Zenith TV in a suburban public square outside of Patras. Though it was dusk, and the images were murky, the film looked familiar, like a dim photo resolving in its pan. My wife and I were trying to read the lips of…

How do you begin to judge your father? The Coast Guard and the insurance company investigators would list my father as blameless in the boating death of Lamar Locklear, our next-door neighbor and my father’s business partner. The boat-a sportsfisher-was christened the Nell, a name my divorced parents had chosen for me had I been…

The calm, early-summer afternoon that “in the flash of a moment would be shattered by gunfire”-the newspaper writer expressed it this way-had been unremarkable for the Blakelys: like the other “returning commuters” (the newspaper writer again), they were sitting in traffic, in the heat, with jazz playing on the radio, saying little to each other,…

Where did I get the idea for this picture? It was the year of El Niño-the current, I mean, and not anything else that I knew about at the time-and the meteorologists were telling us to expect strange events in the atmosphere. They didn’t say anything about events at home, where it hadn’t been good…

The man at her door was bald and wore a blue windbreaker. She had asked him twice what he wanted, but he had only said, “Are you Emily Fletcher?” as if he knew she was, but needed confirmation. It struck her from the man’s salutary tone that she might have won something-an envelope was about…

Kirby Dexter is forty-six years old, and for as long as he has practiced law, more than twenty years, he has thought of himself as someone who solves problems. He is a CPA as well as a tax attorney, and he is the person to call if you want something airtight. He is accustomed to…

Today is my fortieth birthday. I don’t feel old at all. I’ve been sitting here for a while, on this courtyard bench, and if she’s coming, then she’s late. Married couples walk around, trying to interest each other, pointing to the faded pink walls and to the iron balustrades. The men tell the women facts…

The Ivy League is a short haircut. The sides and back are buzzed, and the top is just long enough to comb. It makes Kenny look like the boy in the school portraits his mother props on the mantle. Also like some California surfer our friend Missy fell in love with. Lately, Kenny’s been going…

At night the wind sometimes woke him as it sliced across the tin roof of the cabin, and he would open his eyes in darkness to find his hands gripping the bedframe. Thirty-five knots, forty knots-it was impossible not to gauge the speed of the gusts in his mind. He felt, too, the chastened shudder…