Fiction

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…

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…

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…

‘Yde’s the name. Edward ‘yde . . . or Hyde, as educated folk like yourself would have it. That’s my real name, although for the past fifty years, Hyde has stayed hidden under the moniker of Edward Layman. To the good people here in the West Midlands, I’m just Layman or Ed, no different from…

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,…

Traveling alone, Martin Grant came to a place on the coast in the rain. A place much as he had imagined-green and balmy, with bright splashes of winter flowers and fruit trees and tall palms that rustled in the wind. A place so far from the frozen cornfields of central Iowa that it made him…