Fiction

Dawn. Ice. Light. Third dawn in the season of ice. For the third time we submitted ourselves to the cold and cramped interior of the black carriage, and in most respects this ride, though shorter, was like the last: Bel Esprit was again dressed in red and wore her hat; Seigneur and I were hooded;…

* Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a space ship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars at one end of…

Two people stood quarreling in the Casket Showing Room. They were a sixty-three-year-old man named Marlyn Huutula and his unmarried sister Estona. She was so angry that she bent towards him from her end of the coffin. "You really ought to keep your grimy hands out of that clean quilting!" Estona told him in a…

1 Erroll, the deputy who was known to litter, did not toss any Fresca cans or Old King Cole bags out this night. Erroll brought his Jeep to a stop in the yard right behind Lenny Cobb’s brand new Dodge pickup. The brakes of Erroll, the deputy’s, Jeep made a spiritless dusky squeak. Erroll was…

It is spring, and flamingoes return to the Coggios' lawn, along with the virgin in her sky-blue robe. Inside the miniature picket fence, daisy pinwheels are spinning; a pair of young deer graze and listen. I listen too, imagining the voices of the Coggios calling to me from out behind the house where they take…

Here came Nathalie: forty-one, agile of body, angular of face, with large blue eyes under a flap of greying bangs, dressed at the moment in a woolen bathrobe with threadbare piping, she was carrying her firstborn baby, a daughter, down the upstairs hallway for an early morning nursing. There were paint buckets to be skirted,…

     (from a novel in progress) The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. Francisco Goya He lay prone on the rutted stone path, his bare torso raised and supported by his right forearm, while his left arm and open hand reached vainly toward the empty cave where late had rested the dead body of the Christ…

(from a novel in progress) Maurice Pelletier, four years old, stood in front of an armoire mirror practicing his solo tap routine to "Anchors Aweigh." No music played. He mouthed the words silently with tiny cherub lips and his ordinary house shoes made muffled slaps on the carpet. He wore a white sailor suit and…

". . . as good an explanation as any for the panic is that all the intelligent people were listening to Charlie McCarthy." – A "prominent social scientist" quoted by Hadley Cantrill in The Invasion from Mars Accounts of this kind often begin by giving you the line on some immediate menace. The geeks are…