Fiction

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…

Jana and I were in the bathtub on a drizzly afternoon, miles from anywhere. She was turning the hot water on and off again with her foot. I leaned against her, comparing legs. It made me think I was seven again, at the Albany Art Museum, copping a feel of those rich velvet cordons when…

When light came enough that the sky was blue, Ivy and Track had been driving for an hour already, the three girls and Tad in the back and Bella-Jean smug between them in the front seat, holding a paper bag to throw up in if she had to. Buzzy, the baby, lolled on Ivy's lap…

On the bus from Nashville to Lonoke, Arkansas, Jim Yankee Fish sits in back, in the star suite, with Bones, the bass player, while the star is up front doing business. The young and old singers all call Fish "Yank" when they see him in bars or on the road. Yank, they whisper, and he…

Down the dusty road, and down the river, down below the Bull Cafe. The sun is up and Luster rises. A long hair divides the dog's water dish into the yin-yang. Luster leans to her toothbrush. The roots of her hair throb in her scalp, her heavy hair. She is naked, and sweating already. Uncle…

The gray is terminal this time of year.  The tourists cleared out months ago, leaving us islanders to find one another in the barren streets, exchange pleasantries, then wander home.  I drive into Vineyardhaven for my morning cup of jumpstart while the ferry's moan pushes through air that is damp lint.  Somnambulent, the winter months…

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….