Fiction

S andalwood, Jaime whispers to himself, recalling the vendor who had sold Tony and him the three little vials of this scented oil and the five foil packets of incense. He had a makeshift stall outside the bus terminal in Dudley Square. Wearing an embroidered red and black tarboosh and an immaculately white T-shirt, on…

from The Farewell Symphony   Tomorrow is Toussaint in Paris, All Saint’s Day, and I suppose I’ll visit Brice’s little white marble plaque in the columbarium at Père Lachaise. Why do I avoid it for months on end? I keep thinking of a couple of Americans we met during the year before Brice died. One…

For more than a year, I thought Roman had disappeared from my life. If not for our very adequate postal service, he might have, but the last week of August, I open the mailbox to find an envelope that has been stamped: Moved No Forwarding Address, with an arrow drawn to the return address, tiny…

Glenn Thrip failed to notice the bullet hole in the rear window of his pickup until several days later, after they had removed his wisdom teeth. Snowed on codeine, he was clearing the Nissan’s floor of pennies, trying to extract the keys from beneath the mat, when he looked up and saw the fresh Amnesty…

Hard to believe how popular I was. At Mt. Ephraim High School where I was in ninth grade that spring. Counted ten, twelve, sixteen, nineteen new friends! Not just boys in my class but popular juniors and seniors, athletes began to notice me, smiled and called me Doll, Doll-girl, Ingrid, In-grie. Word spreads fast, who…

In those days, this was how you got to my place: Down from Ruidoso and Ski Apache, you took U.S. 70 (yes, the very route Billy the Kid, notorious bandito and youngster, hightailed horse-style to freedom in olden times) through Tularosa, past Ray’s Tire and Lube and the C & C Restaurant and Lounge, into…

Alberto Perera, librarian, granted no credibility to police profiles of dangerous persons. Writers, down through the centuries, had that look of being up to no good and were often mistaken for smugglers, assassins, fugitives from justice-criminals of all sorts. But the young man invading his sanctum, hands hidden in the pockets of his badly soiled…

Having begun the day with a headache, Bonnie Saks was not particularly surprised to find herself finishing it the same way. Pain, in her experience, never disappeared; it merely retreated for a while and then came back when least convenient in another form. Like men, she thought. All afternoon there had been a chilly, puttering…

Ellie found her son in the school nurse’s office, laid out on a leatherette fainting couch like some child gothic, his shoes off, his arms crossed over his chest, his face turned to the wall. “What’s the deal, Kid Cody?” When he heard her voice, he turned only his head toward her, slowly, as if…