Fiction

June 1973   Early on the morning of Alice’s wedding, when I was nine, I woke to hear the front door slamming into the quiet, and I got out of my bed and went to the window. Standing on tiptoes, feet bare against floor planks chilled by the air conditioner, the breeze running up my…

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…

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…

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…

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….

Zip’s getting married,” Chase tells Marianne, coming into the bedroom and shutting the door behind him. “Oh. Who’s the woman?” “Her name is Flora Ritchie.” “And when is the baby due?” He narrows his eyes at her. “December.” He pulls his shirt off. “But it was still a bitchy thing to say.” “Sorry.” She watches…

I’m in a city called El Paso. I could point it out on a map. Right here, here it is. There is longitude, latitude. For most, this is enough, a satisfactory explanation. But say we don’t use all these imaginary concepts. Say there is no west of or east of or north of or south…

One day Will arrived at work to find a new receptionist sitting behind the front desk, and all that morning he found himself contemplating his brief glimpse of her. She was a large woman, not just in size but also in the boldness of her features-her eyes were big and blue, her cheeks were daubed…

This was what responsibility meant in a dinosaur industry, toward the end of yet another quarter of bad-to-worse news: You called the travel agent back, and even though there was indeed an economy room in the hotel where the conference was being held, a room overlooking the cooling towers, you asked if there wasn’t something…