Fiction

This was the year the summer would not end in Europe. Even the terrorists went about their work in short-sleeved shirts and sandals, hurtling from target to target in air-conditioned BMWs. It was the Chernobyl summer also, and a Polish emigré she knew linked the hazy sunny days and humid nights to the Soviet rads…

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…

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…