Fiction

Lavalle Freeman is coming home from Africa with a parasite. Every morning for the last three weeks at the base he woke up listless and could hardly drag himself out of his bunk for drills in the humid mist. Then he began to urinate blood. The Army doctor outside Kalingani talked with him for half…

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…

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…

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…