Fiction

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…

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…

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 wrote to say this: Send me a picture of the boy we never had, the one with blue eyes, big ears, and a smile that says, Nothing, so far, has hurt too bad. She wrote: Yesterday, when I got your letter, I carried it with me like a dark bloom. I took it with…

Emma's tongue woke him, wending a slow trail downward from his chest and making his hair stand on end. "Mmmm, salty," she said, smacking her lips as his eyes fluttered open, and then the trail of moistness, cool against the morning air, continued down, while Flaubert, the cat, observed with oriental and detached curiosity, and…

There are four of them: Rick and MaryAnn, Molly and Molly's father, MaryAnn's ex. His name is Art. He is a gangly man with a reddish beard and a face that is slightly off kilter. Even on the river he smokes constantly and flicks the butts of his cigarettes into the brown, swift water. They…

My father looked very healthy on the day of his death. There was radiance in his face, light in his eyes, his cheeks were ruddy with a good circulation of blood. It was December 6th, and there was a slanted snowstorm outdoors. When you looked through the window, you had a feeling that the whole…