Fiction

Margaret Many Wounds was dying. Three years earlier she had been diagnosed as diabetic, and now, although she felt her health rapidly declining, she refused to go to the hospital. "I am old anyway," she told her relatives. "Leave me be." Early one morning she called to her daughter: "Let me have a mirror." Lydia…

When I was a boy, my grandmother clutched my chin and said, "Promise me one thing. That you'll never let that mother of yours buy a Mercedes." I promised. It was easy. There was no chance of our buying anything. We filled out sweepstakes for an hour every night that we sent away with stamps…

Next year, writing his personal experience essay to convince admissions at Penn he's Ivy League material despite uneven grades, he'll describe in amusing detail the one baseball game his father took him to, and get in on a scholarship despite his father's explicit pessimism. And he'll do well, though he's not as brilliant as his…

They always meet us at the door and search what we're carrying, before we can go in. It's the same for everybody -routine-but it makes me feel guilty. As if they think we'd be trying to smuggle in something dangerous. The thing is, we don't even realize sometimes, my wife and I. What counts as…

When I saw the sign for piglets I told my father to stop the car. "I want to buy one," I said, attempting to say this with conviction. The thought of raising a pig over the summer had come as suddenly as the sign. "How are you going to raise a pig when you're so…

Translated from Greek by Martin McKinsey She had always said, "When I die, if my Angel comes and takes me for a last look at all the places I've ever lived in or been to, it won't take him more than a couple of minutes." In other words, that's how sheltered and paltry her life…

The first time Sam ever left her children behind to go away by herself, they were two and five. It was a long time ago. She went to a hot springs resort, where she met a very hairy man. Because the man had been there before, and Sam had not, he offered to take her…

When I crossed the border on foot at Scobey six months after the general amnesty, and two weeks after Dad passed on, no brass bands were playing-but it was a well-known fact that even the actual vets didn't get parades. It was a typical eastern Montana March day-wind that had took a running start at…

It was just me and my brother Paul at the coops when Hondo come home with his new truck, ready to kill. He'd been down at Rose's, drinking hard, and as he lurched across the lawn I stepped out in front of him like a fool. You see, me and Paul, we're looking out for…