Fiction

I The lemon tree splatters a lacy shadow over the hot grass. A main bough gave out five years ago under the weight of fruit the size of croquet balls, which should have been picked but wasn't (there are just so many things you can do with lemons). The scar from the missing limb is…

Wyman knows the girl is awake because he hears her finger nails clicking on the passenger-side window, keeping measures of the music that comes through the radio. He wants to glance at her, but is nervous about taking his eyes off the road in the dark. Audra Barranco, she said her name is. He loves…

1. Come back, little Sheeba. That's Uncle Jack thinking he's being smart, but I don't answer. I keep picking strawberries, my fingers red as the berries so I get mixed up thinking I'm seeing a ripe one to grab when it's only my own hand deep in the green leaves. Twenty quarts, twenty-one quarts. One…

Cal used to be president of their fraternity. But then he was in a car wreck. Cal and Hap and a group of boys from the fraternity house had been out to the bars, and they were on their way home. Afterward Hap often pictured Cal dipping his hand into a cooler of beer, letting…

The Stratton Military School for Boys is a quadrangle surrounded by low buildings, surrounded by a stone wall, surrounded by the mountains of north central Pennsylvania. The school is on a hillside above the white clapboard houses of the nearby town. It is a steep slope, the kind where kids might go sledding in winter….

for Marie She was in her thirties, a poet, and she was afraid to fly. Her brother was dying in another city. She did not have a husband or children, but she had a job that held her in the city where she lived. Until her brother went home to die, her job was work…

After days of drifting, the man arrives at a confluence of doors. Had he been adrift on a river, instead of the ocean, it would seem as if he has encountered a logjam from some long removed past when the virgin forests were being dismantled. Had he been drift on city streets, he might have…

Poa compressa, Canadian bluegrass, grows well in both damp and dry climates, blooms the entire season, won't brown even with a late frost, and is a real royal blue; in the right sunlight it looks painted. The first crop on my brother Nelson's grave has come in thickly, almost plush, and kneeling on it, sliding…

Jamey promised to lend me a copy of Nausea. He had borrowed the book from Mr. Loden, the only English teacher at our school who wasn't a nun. Mr. Loden was a Quaker, and he liked to loan us books that weren't in the school library. He owned seven copies of Catcher in the Rye….