Fiction

The truck skidding, myself running, getting nowhere, still hanging onto some foolish piece of laundry, a flowered pillowcase. The truck skidding silently into the tree. My body opening to a big empty scream, Molly. The scream turning to glass, nothing in it, no child. I went back to work, a week or so later, after…

"Pity the poor man," I hear them say, over steaming platters of red beans and rice and leaning against dreary gray storefronts. "He had the whole world in his shirt pocket." I hear them and I cry. It's Lester Banks they speak of Slim, malleably built, brown swells about his eyes that darken with his…

Dolores meets the African boy in a tourist restaurant called The Yoghurt Inn. She is sipping a cold lemon juice, despite her vow to avoid drinks made with unboiled water, and trying to read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It is extremely hot and humid. Before she collapsed in the bamboo-filtered…

My feet were finally starting to get warm, so I knew that it would be time to get out soon. It always happened: as soon as the car heated up enough that you could no longer see your breath, it was time to get out. I looked up at the stone, hardwood and glass structure…

I went to the island that summer, at Webb's invitation, because he and the island were foreign to me, mysterious, not in dark or cunning ways, but with brilliance and light. The beach and his hair gleamed with gold, his eyes and the sea flecked fathomless blue, and the sun and his smile dizzied me…

Sunlight glimmered on the grass, glinted off the black tombstones ahead of Mrs. Kawaguchi. The cemetery grounds had been newly mowed for the Memorial Day weekend and were damp from yesterday's rain: her heels sank deeply into the earth. Wisps of grass clung to her shoes and she could feel the moisture seep into the…

Rain chewed fresh gullies in the ridge road, turning the hard clay dirt to a yellow paste. The ditch overflowed and gray air blurred the low horizon. Dripping tree leaves hung limp and heavy, aimed at the ground. "It'll pass," Mercer said. Coe lit a cigarette and opened the pickup's window an inch. Pellets of…

On his first day at the new job, Joe Frisch was assigned a Haitian woman. Frisch, a refugee himself from grad school, sat at one of a dozen identical metal desks in the Boston office of the Department of Public Welfare, while his new boss hovered over him with one buttock on the desktop: Gillooley,…

Mr. Lee. as he transferred chicken feed from the large bin to his everyday pitcher, noticed how the dust rose from the seeds, how steam rises from a landscape, cold, or hot from a white cup of café con leche, how smoke rises from a casual backyard fire, how a soul is given up from…