Fiction

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…

Out of a sense of adventure that was rare in him, Dr. Geffen Levy, a short man in a plaid sport jacket, left his family in Detroit in June of 1943 and went by train to a medical convention in Ohio. He had been troubled for some months by his rejection from the draft and…

LEARNING OUR LINES: 1952 Mommy is dying. There is a lump growing inside her and it takes all the food. Mommy sleeps alone now and Grandmother sleeps on a cot next to Mommy's bed so she can hear if anything happens or she's needed. Daddy sleeps in my bed and I sleep with Sissy in…

She insisted on the room being as dark as possible, yet the street lights still managed to filter in. She lay with his weight upon her, watching his movements in the mirrored closet doors. In the dark she could barely be seen. Her hands and body moved like wisps of smoke. His white skin was…

Mrs. Chow heard the widow. She tried reading faster but kept stumbling over the same lines. She thought perhaps she was misreading them: "There comes, then, finally, the prospect of atomic war. If the war is ever to be carried to China, common sense tells us only atomic weapons could promise maximum loss with minimum…

From where she was sitting at the kitchen table, her hands deep in the ball of dough in a green bowl, she could see him cross the creek beyond the lower pasture and angle up toward the house. He stopped to lean on the fence that bordered the remains of the summer garden, where the…

It was Rob Baxter's guard dog again. Maddy laid her arm over her scratchy eyes and wondered who the mutt was after tonight. It felt too early for the paper boy, too late for some man strolling with his girlfriend. When the barking didn't stop, Maddy threw back covers and got out of bed. Charlie…