Fiction

Offices of Instruction

When my mother read to us, her voice wasn't like a woman's voice. She sat on the couch and read chapters from long books. It was night, and my father was at work. He took the violin wrapped in chamois in the leather case and played at the hotel in the city. He walked across…

Bag Ladies Never Beg

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…

Amanda

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….

Wedding Night

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…

Cumberland Spring

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…

The Seasons

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…

The Auction

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…

Embarrassment

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…