Fiction

There is a child sitting next to me on this ratty old train, and he is more or less mine. Anyone watching us would not think us an unlikely pair. A young woman travelling with a seven year old kid. Her son, they would assume. I'm old enough, though I never can believe that I…

A group of us were sitting around trying to think of nice things to say about my grandfather. He had died at ten o'clock that morning. So there we all were, gathered in my parents' living room. There was my mother, of course, She was Grandpa Jack's eldest child. And my father. And my mother's…

We didn't know he was dead until after the Gala was over. It was a small college-town fundraiser for the Opera Association, and it was held on the stage of the college theater – on the stage itself, so that we could see the control booth, located at the rear of the auditorium, up where…

Her grandmother would put on her glasses to read labels when the girl went to the market with her. The grandmother would read the brand name and the price out loud to the girl. The girl could not read much herself, but sometimes she pretended she could. The grandmother would read a word, and the…

Katie had already made plans to go to Texas with the baby. Her going didn't have anything to do with Fisher hitting her. On the other hand, she wouldn't change her plans, even though her eyes were black in the morning; even though he cried and said he'd sat up all night in remorse, thinking…

The air conditioner was broken again. Cynthia unscrewed one side from the window and lost interest in fixing it. Now the celery was chopped and the lettuce, cored and cleaned, lay draining in a puddle of water on the sink. Anna hadn't moved her things out yet so Cynthia could still use the good knives….

I I was always interested in myself, but I never thought I went back so far. Joan and I talked about birth almost as soon as we met. I told her I believed in the importance of early experience. "What do you mean by early," she asked, "before puberty, before loss of innocence?" "Before age…

Old man Trainer, they say, has finally gone around the bend. As he rides his Italian ten-speed bicycle down the long slope of curving asphalt roadway toward Red Branch, the farm women watch from their orchards, from screened veranda porches, and they say it: he's crazy. They shake their heads sadly. He's loopy, they say….

"Why don't we forget about the ball," the young woman said. "Why don't you just take a drop?" The man, considerably older, was in the short rough just off the seventh fairway. He was walking carefully, looking down, swinging the head of a two-iron across the tops of wild flowers. "It's a Titleist," he said….