Fiction

Cal used to be president of their fraternity. But then he was in a car wreck. Cal and Hap and a group of boys from the fraternity house had been out to the bars, and they were on their way home. Afterward Hap often pictured Cal dipping his hand into a cooler of beer, letting…

The Stratton Military School for Boys is a quadrangle surrounded by low buildings, surrounded by a stone wall, surrounded by the mountains of north central Pennsylvania. The school is on a hillside above the white clapboard houses of the nearby town. It is a steep slope, the kind where kids might go sledding in winter….

for Marie She was in her thirties, a poet, and she was afraid to fly. Her brother was dying in another city. She did not have a husband or children, but she had a job that held her in the city where she lived. Until her brother went home to die, her job was work…

After days of drifting, the man arrives at a confluence of doors. Had he been adrift on a river, instead of the ocean, it would seem as if he has encountered a logjam from some long removed past when the virgin forests were being dismantled. Had he been drift on city streets, he might have…

Poa compressa, Canadian bluegrass, grows well in both damp and dry climates, blooms the entire season, won't brown even with a late frost, and is a real royal blue; in the right sunlight it looks painted. The first crop on my brother Nelson's grave has come in thickly, almost plush, and kneeling on it, sliding…

Jamey promised to lend me a copy of Nausea. He had borrowed the book from Mr. Loden, the only English teacher at our school who wasn't a nun. Mr. Loden was a Quaker, and he liked to loan us books that weren't in the school library. He owned seven copies of Catcher in the Rye….

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…