Fiction

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…

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…

Boys, men, girls, children, mothers, babies. You got to feed them. You always got to keep them fed. Winter summer. They always have to feel satisfied. Winter summer. But then you stop and ask: Where is the food going to come from? Because it’s never-ending, never-stopping. Where? Because your life is spent on feeding them…

I had a boyfriend my sophomore year of college who wanted to marry me. After we graduated, of course. We were both enrolled in small private schools in North Carolina, his for boys, mine for girls (we were not yet men and women). Unlike me, Bill already knew what he wanted to be: an orthopedic…