Fiction

"Is this Lorraine Hennesey?" the woman wants to know as I lift the phone up to the bed. It's 3 A.M. Hennesey? Hennesey is the name I acquired in my second marriage-still a little strange even after two years. Especially in the middle of the night. "Yes?" "Who is it, Lore?" Sam asks from behind…

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…

My father found himself in Boston once, ten thousand myths away from Oklahoma. I think of him standing on the rim of the Atlantic, the horizon vertical as it describes the Upperworld and the Underworld. It was the water that attracted him, as if he were some kin to the Watermonster, as if he’d heard…

Lee Trambath was a fifty-five-year-old restaurant manager, with three ex-wives and five children. He was a slender, dark-haired man with a trimmed beard that was mostly gray, and he lived and worked in a small Massachusetts town, near the sea. The children were from his first two marriages, three daughters and two sons, grown now…

The reservoir was low. Waiting in the bushes for Jack Noble's car, I searched the water's skin for the steeple of the church that lay drowned beneath. My father had explained how the village of Neversink had stood here until the late 1940s, when the river was dammed and the valley became a giant cup…

They were in a bar far from home when she realized he was falling to pieces. That's what she'd thought: Why, he's falling to pieces. The place was called Gary's. "Honey," he said. He took the napkin from his lap and dipped it in his gin. He leaned toward her and started wiping her face,…

On their last day in Puerto Vallarta, the fathers rented horses. Ellen's father let her come along, though she was only eleven and hadn't ridden before. She stayed close to his side, staring at the tin shacks and rows of hobbled corn along the back streets. Her father drank wine from a pig-bladder pouch and…

A new student-Stephanie Adams-stopped by Professor O'Reilly's office that day, and what she wanted him to do was preposterous. She was a striking, blond-haired girl with large eyes, a small, rather prim mouth, and a bright, nervous manner. What she hoped to persuade him to do would ordinarily have been easy to provide: a recommendation…