Fiction

In 1939, both his parents dead and buried, in the Army Air Corps in basic training, Camel lay on his back and stared up at a wool blanket which hung down from the bunk above his and shaded him from the bright barracks light. As a boy he had lain under the low limbs of…

The first time I listened to a radio my friend Pelly drowned. My family – mother, cousin Jenny, father and I – lived, quite isolated, near Paduola Lake in northern Manitoba. Jenny, a pretty five years old when orphaned over to us, had hair black as birch knotholes, and the staccato yet elegant movements of…

(a novel-in-progress) After you struggle up Santa Monica thru all that thick stop and go traffic and racket, you make those turns and suddenly it's quiet. When you start seein more trees and tall hedges and high walls than you do people, then you know youre in Beverly Hills. At the gate I had to…

I. There was nothing she could do – she caught the boy red-handed. He was kneeling in front of a cabinet in the den (behind its sliding door their raggedy liquor collection and a pile of ancient magazines with their pages violated, torn out for urgent political purposes, covers disheveled), and he was apparently concentrating…

(from Palmares, a novel) "Did you rent me or buy me?" I dared to ask the silent Sobrieski. He said nothing as we walked across a banana grove toward a long squat building. Near it under palm trees were three slave huts, smaller and not as well constructed as the ones on Azevedo's plantation –…

(from a novel in progress) Everything has had youth. The two old dogs were lifted into their baskets lined with old wadded rags. If the old dogs were set down wrong, if their legs were folded too severely underneath them, the legs would fall asleep before the dogs would sleep, and in the morning the…

"Do you mind if I take my teeth out?" He grinned from the bathroom doorway. Lily leaned against the padded headboard, a fringe of green sheet draped across her breasts. "I try to be a gentleman at all times." His grin broadened to a leer. He would have pinched her buttock again. The left one…

Growing up in the beautiful lonesome Cumberland mountains, Nadine Florence might almost as well have had no family at all. She gave herself over to solitary speculation or spent time following the progress of the seasons. On her sixteenth birthday she saw the famous moonbow of the Cumberland Falls. The wooden boardwalk led behind the…

They own no dogs; the maid sleeps out. The catches on the windows are those old-fashioned brass ones, butterfly locks. No alarm system or fancy security. He memorized everything Nick had to tell about this job. He pulls on black cotton gloves, soft and close like ladies' gloves. He is no longer just a man…