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…

"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…

Dolores meets the African boy in a tourist restaurant called The Yoghurt Inn. She is sipping a cold lemon juice, despite her vow to avoid drinks made with unboiled water, and trying to read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It is extremely hot and humid. Before she collapsed in the bamboo-filtered…

My feet were finally starting to get warm, so I knew that it would be time to get out soon. It always happened: as soon as the car heated up enough that you could no longer see your breath, it was time to get out. I looked up at the stone, hardwood and glass structure…

I went to the island that summer, at Webb's invitation, because he and the island were foreign to me, mysterious, not in dark or cunning ways, but with brilliance and light. The beach and his hair gleamed with gold, his eyes and the sea flecked fathomless blue, and the sun and his smile dizzied me…

Sunlight glimmered on the grass, glinted off the black tombstones ahead of Mrs. Kawaguchi. The cemetery grounds had been newly mowed for the Memorial Day weekend and were damp from yesterday's rain: her heels sank deeply into the earth. Wisps of grass clung to her shoes and she could feel the moisture seep into the…

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…