Fiction

"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…

There was a time when gas station attendants cleaned car windshields with soft blue paper towels. My dad inherited the company that made those blue paper towels, and shortly after the Arab oil embargo, due to poor financial planning, he went bankrupt. With no responsibilities in the towel business he turned to what really interested…

Barbarians were churning the farms into mud, polluting our wells. I had to escape. This was 1969. I was thirteen years old, hiding in the basement. The frayed plastic webbing of my father's green lounge chair tickled my legs, which were only half-shaped-curved here, blockish there. A photo from Life was taped to the window:…

They were living in Providence again after spending the summer in Wildwood, New Jersey. In Wildwood, Stephen worked on a fishing boat, a deep-sea charter named The Pied Piper. It was a bad name for a fishing boat since it made people think of rats in the water. Families and businesses hired the boat for…

It is two o'clock on a Friday afternoon in April. The willows along the river north of town are a tender grasshopper-green; patches of henbit and bitter cress sprout like tufts of hair in the winter-weary yards. In the basement of the library on Main Street, Miss Lucy McKewn, age thirty-six, assistant librarian, cleans up…

My father is telling me about Victoria again. I smile, nod, remind him I am a journalist and that I cannot just sit down and write a book about Victoria because he is sure it will make a best seller, full of romance, intrigue, and heartbreak. "It's rags to riches to rags again!" my father…

The day the shortstop died, Katie Mays was in the kitchen, arranging a sprig of baby's breath, fresh from the garden, onto her father's breakfast tray. Merely glancing at the front-page headlines, she opened the Daily Oklahoman to page five-sports scores and standings-and placed it neatly next to the cut-glass pitcher of orange juice. More…

MORNING Alvin Bishop rises at dawn and faces east, framed in his bedroom window, a thin, naked man, skin the white of flour, hair wild from sleep and as dark as the earth. The sun's light, but not the sun, is visible to him, as if the thing itself were buried nightly beneath the rows…

When finishing graduate school at Harvard, Manny Chokra met with instant and astonishing success. At the age of twenty-six, quite by chance, he made two new discoveries in the field of neurological physiology, and though his dissertation was barely complete, universities all over the country were offering him jobs. Manny accepted a tenure-track position at…