Fiction

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…

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…

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…

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…