Fiction

Mrs. Chow heard the widow. She tried reading faster but kept stumbling over the same lines. She thought perhaps she was misreading them: "There comes, then, finally, the prospect of atomic war. If the war is ever to be carried to China, common sense tells us only atomic weapons could promise maximum loss with minimum…

From where she was sitting at the kitchen table, her hands deep in the ball of dough in a green bowl, she could see him cross the creek beyond the lower pasture and angle up toward the house. He stopped to lean on the fence that bordered the remains of the summer garden, where the…

It was Rob Baxter's guard dog again. Maddy laid her arm over her scratchy eyes and wondered who the mutt was after tonight. It felt too early for the paper boy, too late for some man strolling with his girlfriend. When the barking didn't stop, Maddy threw back covers and got out of bed. Charlie…

They are together and asleep between cotton sheets when the phone rings. Early morning bleeds blue through tinted shades. Tanner reaches back to the endstand for the receiver without rolling over. He recognizes the heavily accented voice of his father-in-law instantly, though he has not heard it in years. The line is thick with fuzzy…

I once asked Lizard whether he too watched the iridescent lights that played across his vision. Whenever I am weary and confused, I shut my eyes and wait as the orbs of yellow and phosphorescent blue creep in from the sides. Lizard said he wished he could slither between my lids. I laughed because I…

Every night I use to think, I have to get up, because it always like this. Wait, listen, hold my own breathing till I hear him. I would breathe in his rhythm, try and take in the air he done let out his mouth, back then when it was still sweet and warm, like years…

Cara has crooked feet because we're poor. They are twisted up like an old lady's and bunions haunt her big toes. She's getting the wraps off today and she's truly believing her feet are going to be beautiful. Mama spoons some dry pancake mix into her mouth and says, "Don't get your hopes too high….

Ben wriggles around, crowding closer. He's cold. More than that, he wants his mother to be awake. He presses against her, feeling for her heartbeat. It's not a beat he can count, separate knocks through her skin. It's more a constant soft rustle, like a mouse scratching around under a pile of dry leaves. There's…

Years ago on a Sunday afternoon in late October Hetty and her mother's boyfriend Dyan Trumball-the one who played acoustical guitar with a local band-were walking in the lakeside park a few miles from Hetty's mother's house. Hetty was thirteen years old at the time with a narrow face and dark warm watchful eyes-so nervously…