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…

There was a time when gas station attendants cleaned car windshields with soft blue paper towels. My dad inherited the company that made those blue paper towels, and shortly after the Arab oil embargo, due to poor financial planning, he went bankrupt. With no responsibilities in the towel business he turned to what really interested…

Barbarians were churning the farms into mud, polluting our wells. I had to escape. This was 1969. I was thirteen years old, hiding in the basement. The frayed plastic webbing of my father's green lounge chair tickled my legs, which were only half-shaped-curved here, blockish there. A photo from Life was taped to the window:…

They were living in Providence again after spending the summer in Wildwood, New Jersey. In Wildwood, Stephen worked on a fishing boat, a deep-sea charter named The Pied Piper. It was a bad name for a fishing boat since it made people think of rats in the water. Families and businesses hired the boat for…

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…