Fiction

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…

The sky was still black when Joe Hennessy came out to stand in his driveway, and the moon was nothing more than a shadow. It wasn't unusual for Hennessy to be out at odd hours; he hadn't been able to sleep for two weeks, not since he was promoted to detective. He could feel his…

This was the year the summer would not end in Europe. Even the terrorists went about their work in short-sleeved shirts and sandals, hurtling from target to target in air-conditioned BMWs. It was the Chernobyl summer also, and a Polish emigré she knew linked the hazy sunny days and humid nights to the Soviet rads…

As a baby, my father claimed, I was a cat. I don't know what hard evidence he had, but at one time I played along with him to the extent that, when introduced to strangers, I fell on all fours (I'm not proud of this) and said meow. Later I acquired every known cat toy:…

for Burt Bates was in his office at the state capitol when his ex-wife called to say that Donald Ross was dying. She had heard it from Mickey Healy in Vancouver who had been in touch with Hugh Quinn in Eugene. Cancer of the pancreas, she said. Metastasized. The doctors gave him a month. "God,"…

There's no way of knowing what a woman owns until she's dead. Until it's time to clean out her closets and drawers to make room for something else, there's no way of knowing what she needed, and wanted, to hide. "I've been thinking," my sixty-three-year-old father said, "that it's time to go through your mother's…

Sarah didn't pause to watch the water-seller scurry from his spot in the shade to the path leading to the ruins and gardens. The shallow copper bowls ringed to the belts crisscrossing his bright red shirt jangled softly and flashed in the sunlight. The water-seller made a show of splashing the ground in front of…

It rains in Rodney, in the winter. But we have history; even for Mississippi, we have that. There's a sweet olive tree that grows all the way up to the third story, where Elizabeth's sun porch is. Butterflies swarm in the front yard, in the summers, drunk on the smell of the tree; but in…