Fiction

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…

My husband often traced what he called the minor flaws of my character to Kansas City, Missouri-a city he placed in the dead middle of the Midwest, a “stunningly homogeneous” town, he liked to say, where it must have been horrifyingly easy for me to grow up believing untruths about the world. Often enough I…

The advice note, dropped on my father’s desk in the first week of September 1955, lay unread for a week. My father was away from home, resolving a dispute over burial sites in Manchester. He was a synagogue troubleshooter, the Red Adair of Anglo-Jewish internecine struggles, and it was his job to travel up and…

Fei Lo noticed the new clerk right away, a persimmon in a basket of oranges. Three letters on a gold-toned plaque spelled out her name. So as to make no mistake, the old gentleman wrote it in his notebook, fur. He liked to know the names of all the women tellers, as he flirted with…

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…