Fiction

The woman across the street bends over to pull a weed from her front steps. I set a fresh cup of coffee on the Help Wanted section and watch from my second-story kitchen window. She is married to a surgeon. It's a two-Mercedes family. She and the surgeon have two daughters. One married a lawyer…

Everything is in the bag. Everything.       Orange shawl necklace chemise cigar garter belt string banana umbrella sweater button superball duck socks             No. Incomplete.             Moldy half orange, torn yellowed shawl, pink rayon chemise, frayed flowered garter belt, two pieces of string…

The press pass gets you in the door. You have a friend who works for Action News and he owes you for the time he took the MG out to Westchester and hit a ten-point buck deer. You know people who have been hunting for twenty years and have never seen a ten point buck….

I have worked at the bus station magazine stand since nineteen fifty three, waiting for the right girl to come along. When I took this job, the paint on that wall over there was new; it was a light green color then. The servicemen from the Korean War would stop and buy cigarets, and I…

In early June my father drove us west in the Chevy station wagon. I turned eleven in Yellowstone National Park. For my birthday I got an Indian headdress and a tom-tom with a black rubber drumhead. I felt that I was too old for that. By the time we reached Seattle, we had broken down…

He and his companion had escaped the streets of War for the day, and he followed the older boy by several yards. They had made the deciduous woodland, accompanied by the Kentucky and worm-eating warblers, and had come to the spruce-fir line. Somewhere from its domed ground nest an ovenbird passed itself off as a…

Joy, who is now twenty-six years old, is waiting to conceive as if by accident a child with the man she loves. This will be irrefutable proof, she reasons, that she loves him and that they must marry. Though she has not believed in God for perhaps thirteen years she reasons too that conceiving a…

If you drive east out of Centerville on Highway 50, about seven or eight miles down the road you pass the waterworks. Go another mile or so and you've crossed Swan Creek; if it's summertime the stream will be low but steady, while in winter it will seem like a lake. Sometimes from the bridge…

A constable walked up and down on the pavement below the open windows. Inside, the party of eight had finished dinner and sat drinking brandy by the windows over-looking the Park. Someone in the room suggested that they each tell the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to them. The hostess spoke first, while…