Fiction

FIRE One girl among us set herself on fire. She used gasoline. She was too young to drive at the time. I wondered how she'd gotten hold of it. Had she walked to her neighborhood garage and told them her father's car had run out of gas? I couldn't look at her without thinking about…

Walter could almost feel the rush of breath, hear the women roaring, mothers, girlfriends, sisters, sweeping up towards the flight deck, the warm fall day, San Francisco, 1945. A couple chasing a blue jump-suited baby girl just beginning to walk wobbled by him in exaggerated pursuit. He had been alone that day. Hadn’t wanted to…

I met Kazmir at Mrs. Malek's. He was a couple years older than I was, though only a grade ahead of me. His blond hair was just growing back from the baldy sour they'd given him after the school nurse found lice, and the deep, white-welted scar commemorating a fall from a second-story window when…

Jimmy returned from summer camp in love with fishing. He swam, played baseball, took riflery and even horseback riding, but passed his best days dangling a five-pound cat-gut line in the cold, blue lakes of Wisconsin. He was sad when camp ended and he said good-bye to Uncle Marv, the counselor who taught him fishing,…

Half-hidden in the kitchen's semi-darkness, Ira stood at a window, watching lights come on in a farmhouse across the road. He saw her figure framed in yellow light, and then she slowly drifted away. Christmas tree lights came on pulsing, casting shadows, dappling the snow outside. Beyond her house the sky hung low on a…

The mismatched, worn plates waited on the table, clouds of steam rose from the kettle of boiling potatoes and condensed on the windows. Mae slid the big frying pan onto the hot front lid and knocked in a spoonful of bacon fat. When the pan smoked she laid in thick pieces of pork side meat….

The Lone Night Cantina was not a real cowboy bar. In those places, imagined Annie Wells, in those roadside joints outside of Cheyenne or Amarillo, just off a two-lane highway with pickups made in the good ol’ U.S. of A. parked in the dirt lot, the men angled their sweat-stained Stetsons over the eyes and…

To begin warily, let us say this has to do with words, the appalling paucity, herself talking to herself when she was accustomed to the daily slap and tickle within the ebb of routine. But he was away now visiting his father who was, as they said, fragile, a word she said to herself as…

The boy could hardly remember a time when he had not been in the car. The car and the driving hadn't really made him forget; they just made it hard to believe there was anything else in the world except them. It was night again. He no longer watched the beads of light in the…