Fiction

It was Labor Day, September 2, a Monday, five years ago, and I was twenty-seven years old and about to bring my forty-four-year-old mother and my forty-four-year-old father together for the first time in my adult life. All my life I had daydreamed about this moment, wondered if it would ever happen, and now that…

Don’t doubt there’s a future. Rushing toward you. It was flat pavement, a busy pedestrian mall between downtown streets where she was walking in the tattered sunshine of a moist April morning when without warning the sidewalk tilted to her left, and a sharp pain like a wasp’s stinging attacked the calf of her left…

In the first week of the last month of the semester, a new young inmate came into the classroom, took a seat, and watched the teacher with sharp eyes. Soon he was involved with discussions-even wrote essays, original stuff, quick-zipped them off, so smart. Sharp, and charming, good-looking yet warm, yet an edge of violence….

Mother calls two or three nights a week now, trying to make me come see my father, who is dying of cancer in the hospital in Missouri. “He asks for you,” she says. “Come on.” “Don’t you think he’s sorry for things?” “He’s never said so.” “You were hard to handle.” “I was a kid.”…

When she needed to say something just to hear the sound of her own voice, she said “Sam,” struck to find his name on the tip of her tongue: she would have reasoned she was so angry that his name would have needed some summoning up, but no. The stream rilling past Jenny’s boots ran,…

Rhonda felt Cy’s ribs through his T-shirt that proclaimed rock-and-roll in thunderbolt letters. The leather jacket he wore today magnified him: his height, the breadth of his shoulders, the glimmer of fear he struck in her. Suddenly she was afraid that this was all they had, a striking look that turned heads, a few sexy…

My new wife took very few possessions with her when she left Peru, mostly blouses and books and clumps of the hot pepper aji wrapped in cellophane, but she did remember to pack her photograph of her father. It was a cloudy black-and-white shot taken in 1960 on his fifty-fourth birthday, two years before his…

Maybe it happened as the first long earth-wave rolled through our town. Maybe it was later. We had aftershocks all night. Faith, my wife, wouldn’t sleep inside. No one would but me. Everyone spent the night in the driveways on cots, or on the lawns in sleeping bags, as if this were a neighborhood slumber…

I’ll tell you what I know. Although my name is in that won­derful program-“Melissa Halliday” is me, right there under “Principals”-I know myself enough to know that my shining moment was a mistake, which is okay since my mother taught me self-respect, my father taught me common sense, and living with my brother has put…