Fiction

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…

In those days, this was how you got to my place: Down from Ruidoso and Ski Apache, you took U.S. 70 (yes, the very route Billy the Kid, notorious bandito and youngster, hightailed horse-style to freedom in olden times) through Tularosa, past Ray’s Tire and Lube and the C & C Restaurant and Lounge, into…

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…

Having begun the day with a headache, Bonnie Saks was not particularly surprised to find herself finishing it the same way. Pain, in her experience, never disappeared; it merely retreated for a while and then came back when least convenient in another form. Like men, she thought. All afternoon there had been a chilly, puttering…

Ellie found her son in the school nurse’s office, laid out on a leatherette fainting couch like some child gothic, his shoes off, his arms crossed over his chest, his face turned to the wall. “What’s the deal, Kid Cody?” When he heard her voice, he turned only his head toward her, slowly, as if…

Deborah set about making herself useful from the minute she woke up, and most mornings she was first in the household to rise. She pushed off the bedcovers, slipped into her robe, and washed in the bathroom, dressing cautiously and wincing if a zipper or button clanked against the closet door; her bed was in…

I was fourteen that summer. August brought heat I had never known, and during the dreamlike drought of those days, I saw my father for the first time in my life. The tulip poplars had faded to yellow before September came. There was no rain for weeks, and the people’s faces along Eleventh Street wore…

The outer Cape in mid-October. A new tilt to the earth and its altered angle to the sun make for a suffusing clarity. Hopper’s light. With the tourists gone, the beaches have been reclaimed by gulls, and the road that traverses the peninsula is bare. At this time of year, delays occur behind school buses….