Fiction

We used to drive around in the car at night, we didn't have anything else to do. We didn't like to be in our apartment. There weren't places we could sit and do things. If I read my homework on the bed, there wasn't anywhere for my mother to go. The sofa in the living…

Elizabeth's next-door neighbors were having a barbecue. Though Elizabeth and Henry had lived in the house since his retirement three years before, they had only once eaten dinner next door, and the neighbors had only once visited them. After Henry's car accident, the Newcombs had called several times, but when Henry returned, they again only…

This is the Eastern shore. Light flatters the land. Nature is docile here. It is the time of year after the corn harvest and before the geese. It is my annual return. I live in Europe but my mother insists I come back each fall because each fall may be my father's last. The car…

1949. I am already six years old and no stranger to adversity when my mother shakes me awake one September morning and tells me we are leaving Los Alamos and moving to Santa. Fe. Instinctively, I sniff her breath for liquor. But there is only the sour musk of coffee and, from her armpits, another…

SUNDAY The sky was overcast and the weather cold outside. Sylvia called her mother early in the morning before Mass. The mother talked to an older son, David, and later left with the youngest. The two of them took the bus to Pasadena, catching the 92 on Florence and Holmes Aves. in front of the…

She is sickened at all she knows: -about the many ways to make gray with watercolors, creeping up on it from yellow and blue and red with a lot of water or down from black or purple. And brown, brown can edge into gray too somehow. -about corruption in the unions, every union she can…

This is what Ernest whispers to her. "You ever had a man to go down on you? How you like me to be going down on you? How you like that? You like Ernest to eat you out? "You ever suck black cock? How you like suckin me off?" When Miss Foote calls on her,…

"Hi babe" Hidalgo always said. Then as always wordlessly we made love. I was brutal just short of ruining the sex. Then we would lie almost dead. "I've got to go!" I cried suddenly, pulling on my clothes, checking to see they were right-side-out, and running home to Algot who was sick. Hidalgo said he…

Mrs. Lovelady, in a morning-fresh white uniform, helped Lisa's mother-in-law, Mrs. Worthy, into the car. Lisa could only stand by and watch. The bucket seat was too low and dangerously tilted for Mrs. Worthy as she was now, and Lisa wished she had listened to David, and had come in his car instead of her…