Fiction

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….

Finding things had always been her greatest pleasure. She was not systematic, not one of the ones who bought the local paper and mapped out a route between all of Saturday’s yard sales. What she loved was driving down the road and coming upon the sign-a rough paper bag tacked to a telephone pole, or…

Daniel was already home. “Hi,” he yelled from the kitchen as Em wrestled her overcoat onto a hanger in the overfull front closet. What the hell was he doing? Breaking rocks on the counter? “Hi,” she yelled back, unwinding her scarf. “Annie call?” Wham. Wham. Wham. “No,” Daniel called back. Wham. “What are you doing?”…

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…

Pat Boone-not the Pat Boone but only a graduate student in Agricultural Science-was driving the oysters down to Mulberry to have them irradiated. He was used to being the wrong Pat Boone but was nevertheless miserable, careening down Interstate 75 in the windless predawn, gripping the wheel of the Food Science van with his troubled…