Fiction

  • Smugglers

    By folding his legs so that his feet touched his thighs, Matt was able to completely immerse himself in hot water-water he had paid for shilling by shilling, dropping small English coins into a rusted metal box one by one to keep the water flowing until the bathtub was full. The tiny washroom was freezing…

  • Dear Nicole

    They grew up playing hockey on Everett Pond, long after supper, after homework and Bonanza or Laugh-In or My Three Sons, after they said good night and went to their rooms yawning as if headed to sleep. The grown-ups pretended not to know about the rendezvous at the rink, but some of the fathers had,…

  • The Big Room

    Jen and I were driving through New Mexico with her father, who was a retired insurance guy just a few years older than me, a tall, thin guy with a swatch of white hair that slipped across his scalp as if it had fallen there from a tree. Jen thought this trip would be a…

  • The Order of the Arrow

    Heitman, the queerbait, the insane, is my tentmate. Again. Porter, the fat kid who cries a lot, cried again this morning, saying he didn’t want to tent with Heitman ever again. Last night Heitman put ticks on Porter’s eyelashes while he slept. This morning our Scoutmaster, Casper, had to pluck them off with tweezers, since…

  • Braid

    In the late winter of 1985, John Rogan had been a surgeon for almost thirty-five years, and though still active and vital, a tall, erect, white-haired man, with a reputation for audacity matched by success, he was thinking of retiring. His older brother, also a surgeon, had apparently committed suicide the year before. He had…

  • Eggs

    The Andersons’ house perched on the corner of our block like a dinosaur, with wings and a tail that spread into the lot behind it, growing in sections as the family increased. Mrs. Anderson had five children by her first husband, who died in bed of a heart attack the morning of their tenth anniversary….

  • The Three-Legged Man

    The summer I was fourteen, I went to stay in a small house in Connecticut with my grandmother and grandfather. My mother sent me there, she told me years later, because I was driving her crazy, coming home late, shirking my chores, smoking my father’s cigarettes. She wanted me out of the house, she said,…