Fiction

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…

This novel, titled Recipes From the Dump, is a mock cookbook of our culture. Spoken in the first person, the main character is a single mother of three, trying to cope in a world that appears to be falling apart. While reading the personals and taking evening walks with her wise neighbor, Gabby Fulbriten assembles…

On the plane coming back to Louisiana for my father’s funeral, I remembered a story he used to tell when I was a child. It was this: A little girl is crossing over a bridge. There’s a troll under the bridge who doesn’t like little girls; any that cross over, he eats them up. But…

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…

Karen pushed away from the edge of the desk. She should have brought a poster along to give her eyes some hold on the blank wall-a favorite painting, or that eleven-by-fourteen frame with different size cutouts in the mat, oval and square and rectangular openings, her daughter gazing through them at different stages of her…

Paul Burkholder always had firecrackers, and sitting on my back porch again he kept lighting inchers, one after another, holding then tossing each over the railing where they exploded, the shreds of blue-and-red paper settling on the shiny green leaves of pachysandra. Jimmy Sterzic was there, too, as always, chewing squares of bubble gum and…

He kept the maps. They'd had a cardboard Kahlua box of maps, forest service maps, topo maps, road maps, some of them from the early Sixties when his parents had taken him and his brothers on road trips in the summers. She had to admit they were mostly his maps, though she'd grown to love…