Fiction

After the protests began, I started running on the beach. I went up every day after work, took off my long sleeves and concealing skirts, slid into nylon shorts and a tanktop. Then I ran. Two kilometers north along the curve of the beach, followed by a swim in the warm, enervating sea. The run…

We're mining a vein of blue clay under the red dusty Texas topsoil, squaring up a ditch the backhoe left too rough and can't get back to. We slice at the walls with the sides of our shovels and peel up from the bottom long curls of clay that twist away like orange rind. "The…

My wife and I, we have this game we play called "Confusing the Dog." My wife, she plays the game, knows all the rules, but she doesn't know I named it. I named it about the time I realized we were hooked-us and the dog. The game goes like this: I go to bed or…

Dan had fallen asleep waiting for Nick and this Patty Keith, fallen deep into the lapping rhythm of a muggy Chesapeake evening, and when he heard the slam of car doors the sound came first from a dream. In the hushed amber light of the foyer Dan offered Nick a dazed and disoriented father's hug….

Five-five and one-twelve, thirteen years old, out of an obscure elementary school, a complete unknown. Dale Wheeler walked into the boys' locker room to spin the dial of his combination lock. It was Emerson Junior High, a school with a double gym with a floor the color of whiskey upon which street shoes were never…

On a deceptively mild evening in the fall of 1964, a bomb exploded in Hayes-Bick. It had wobbled in like a rugby ball tossed into a scrum and lay there innocently for a few seconds, as if waiting to be kicked. Then it blew up. Dense, acrid smoke instantly filled the cafeteria. There was no…

I’ve been an off-season traveler since my divorce, and this winter I’m in Spain. A man is following me. On the train from Madrid he was a businessman with an eager mustache and samples of his product: copper wires, copper disks, copper beaten into thin, pliable sheets. I took everything he gave me and stuffed…

Cally was sitting Indian-style on the hood of their banged-up Impala, her jeans unbuttoned halfway down to ease the strain of morning sickness. Earlier in the day it had been foggy and cold, and she was still wrapped in one of Jack's blue flannel shirts, her blond hair falling down over her shoulders. She was…

In those days-I mean the Forties and Fifties, of course-people were so extremely reticent and modest that the hard questions might not even come to mind, let alone to words. Perhaps if I had discovered all at one blow that Oliver was in truth an Olive. I might have reacted more strongly. But it didn't…