Fiction

T he squad was made up of three girls from a school. The girls’ names was Debbie, Donna, and Shenay. They was stalwart, steady, and statuesque, always going round not hurting old people or weak boys but helping them. They strolled down Ronald Drive and Cahill Street to Nathalie Avenue to way over to Jefferson…

When I decided to ask Recita Holguin to marry me, I visited my confessor, The Bishop, in his place of banishment. He is not a bishop now, but he was once. “Red!” he said. “Red!” And he hugged me close, his cheek and ear pressed hard against my chest. He stepped back, and raised up…

I grew up in Garden City, a small Pennsylvania community where my brother, Adrian, and I were the only Jews in our elementary school. I got along better with the kids than Adrian, played sports and made friends more easily, but still I had my troubles. One day I went into Mrs. Nick’s-short for Nicodemus-a…

In the room in Mexico where they finally reunited, Bird knelt by the bed, Kin lay on it as he’d done for weeks, and JJ settled into the canvas butterfly chair at its foot. Bird often knelt by Kin’s bed these days, as if praying-which she also often did these days, though not on her…

In 1969, except for the yearly wardrobe changes of the young officers’ wives, Randolph Air Force Base had barely acknowledged the decade. The young officers discussed shoeshines, the laundry that put the sharpest crease in their everyday khakis, which colonel gave the best TDY. Friday afternoons the wives met them at the Officers Club. The…

There were two women I thought might be able to help me, or rather help Lance, and that night, sitting on the bus on the way home from the hospital, I vowed to find one or both of them the next day, even if I had to cancel a couple of my afternoon classes to…

Later the squat white cylinders with their delicate indentations would be revealed as a species of lantern. But when Krzysztof Wojciechowicz first glimpsed them, dotted among the azaleas and rhododendrons and magnolias surrounding Constance Humboldt’s kidney-shaped swimming pool, he saw them as dolls. The indentations cut the frosted tubes like waists, a third of the…

The Buffalo Vision Late on the third night of the Sun Dance, most of the hundred Crow people within the Big Lodge had fallen asleep. The fire was low, the singers’ voices hoarse over the drumbeat. Only John Sees the Hill still danced in place, his back to the circular wall of upright aspen boughs….

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…