Fiction

Marquette Henley’s stepson, Lance, had always been a distant boy, dull-eyed and solitary, not at all like the eager young athletes Marquette waited on in his store. Lance spent most of his time watching television with the lights off and the curtains drawn. Blond and pale-eyed, he had skin that seemed to whiten with each…

The billboards into Lovelock, Nevada, promised dinner and drink coupons, a roll of quarters, hot showers, cable television, king-sized beds, breakfast coupons, twenty-four-hour free coffee, air conditioning, and a swimming pool, all for only thirty-nine ninety-nine, and Benjamin West, after three nights dozing in rest stops by the side of the interstate, could not help…

How could a grown man with any self-respect sit in the Ghirardelli Chocolate Factory at eleven o’clock in the morning and eat a hot fudge sundae with mint chip ice cream, hold the nuts? It was Charlie’s own question; his answer was that he wasn’t a grown man, he was a grown boy, or maybe…

Right away, I started meeting people who knew my brother. A bank teller cashing a traveler’s check for me was one. At first, she gave me a half-glance when I passed the check through the window towards her, more interested in the amount than my identity. Then she noticed my last name and slowly lifted…

She made some big changes that spring. The first one was moving out of David’s house in Beachwood Canyon and into a one-bedroom apartment in Park La Brea. “Old ladies live there,” was David’s comment. “I like old ladies,” she said. “Old ladies are quiet and considerate. They don’t have car phones, either.” “I’m at…

The poetry club in Jean’s neighborhood scheduled readings of new works every Wednesday in the basement of a popular restaurant, The Two Bruce Café. A surprising lot of people showed up regularly to hear and then critique the week’s artistic efforts, and the two lawyers named Bruce who owned the place felt rewarded because the…

“It’s not a cult,” Laura wrote. “The land is beautiful and the roads are smooth. In the fields there’s corn-tiny husks, green and perfect-shaped. God planted them. He built the roads. There’s so much I never understood.” “God doesn’t build roads,” I wrote back. “People do. Mexican workers and kids without college degrees. Come home…

Down where it is dry and wild, across the border where the bad guys went when the sheriff was after them, there is a hilltop. On it live a man and a woman, both expatriates, who drink, give orders to Mexicans, pretend to work. Although they have a blue swimming pool and get all their…

In heaven there is no beer. That’s why: There was a bar outside of Pigeon Forge, crawled back onto a flat space hanging off its mountain, where someone, seemingly inspired by great forces, had seen the fiction of her body, and in tribute rendered it fantastically, overwhelmingly, in fluorescent paints across the entirety of the…