Fiction

Karen pushed away from the edge of the desk. She should have brought a poster along to give her eyes some hold on the blank wall-a favorite painting, or that eleven-by-fourteen frame with different size cutouts in the mat, oval and square and rectangular openings, her daughter gazing through them at different stages of her…

Paul Burkholder always had firecrackers, and sitting on my back porch again he kept lighting inchers, one after another, holding then tossing each over the railing where they exploded, the shreds of blue-and-red paper settling on the shiny green leaves of pachysandra. Jimmy Sterzic was there, too, as always, chewing squares of bubble gum and…

He kept the maps. They'd had a cardboard Kahlua box of maps, forest service maps, topo maps, road maps, some of them from the early Sixties when his parents had taken him and his brothers on road trips in the summers. She had to admit they were mostly his maps, though she'd grown to love…

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…

When Gracie Kang's elder twin sisters reached the age of eighteen, they went down to the Alameda County Shipyards and got jobs piecing battleships together for the U.S. Navy. This was the place to find a husband in 1945, if a girl was doing her own looking. They were Americans, after all, and they were…

In the mornings I get to the mall before anyone else, even the other shop owners. They haven't got the music on yet, and all I can hear as I set up is the plish-plosh of the fountain. Without any flowers covering my cart, you can notice the builder's skill-wooden pegs at the joints, not…

As an Asian In 1965, when I was nine, my father moved us from Japan to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He had been an exchange student at Louisiana State University years ago, and now LSU had invited him to be a visiting professor in the agriculture department. We rented an apartment near campus, across the street…