Fiction

On the last day of our vacation in Paris, I was thinking that it's better to be content at Our Lady of Perpetual Aluminum Siding than to feel disappointment at Notre-Dame Cathedral. John, sitting beside me during the Spanish-language service, held my hand and stared down at the floor. He looked morose because the day…

Each night when Sandra got in from work, she watched the late movie on TV and ate a cold boiled egg with a Coca-Cola, sometimes with sesame crackers if she remembered to bring a few packets from the restaurant where she had been a hostess for the past two weeks. She had been drifting off…

The night Davis and I told our father we wanted a bomb shelter, I sat in silence at the dinner table, listening for sounds from my mother's bedroom. I watched my father butter his bread. I watched Davis sort through his 3-D cards, whose deep focal views-a fisherman with the Hoover Dam behind him, a…

When Burns arrived in Kotzebue, they were shooting the dogs. He'd never been to Alaska before and it seemed without compromise. Weather had kept him in Nome for two days where he'd seen a saloon fire. He'd been across the street in a shop buying chocolate and bottled water, and the eerie frozen scene mesmerized…

The Bighorns float above the haze to the west of our ranch like marble palaces in a fairy tale. Until the woman came, we'd never been up in those mountains. My father kept us to work day after day, or else there was school, and, until the woman, he'd said he couldn't leave the ranch…

Monday her car wouldn't start and Anita spent all day renting-a-wreck and driving like crazy to the hospital two hours away, and at five she arrived, and at five her father wasn't dead. (It was the carburetor, she found out later.) At five Anita's father was only dying: a man so pumped with fluid he'd…

Their plans were to develop the valley, and my plans were to stop them. I was caretaking this ranch in Montana that the two of them had bought, or were buying. One of them was an alcoholic and the other was a realtor. The alcoholic-the big one-was from New York and did something on the…

Since she's not in a hurry-not ever, anymore-Lydia Zimmer takes time to read the signs. Loose Carrots, Cherry Tomatoes, Pickling Cukes. She nods, stopping her cart by a bin. Purple Top Turnips, Lemon Curd, And she squints, her eyes in the mornings clear but dry. California Seedless. Another cart pushes around her, a young mother…

1 Half awake, pawing at the night table for The Book of Great Conversations, I knock the bottle onto the floor. The sound hangs there: there's a ringing part of it and a shattering part of it and a splashing part of it. I smell the gin. Well, it can stay there until I feel…