Fiction

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…

The ceremony was in a side chapel, with Howard giving her away, and Mary matron of honor, and Susan flower girl, and David (their new baby, which she'd helped to care for first few days, but Louie hadn't seen) crying in Nancy's arms, so Mary had to take him back; and Frank best man, and…

Nothing ever seemed to go right for the 57th Division. It had come overseas just in time to take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge; then, too-quickly strengthened with masses of new replacements, it had plodded through further combat in eastern France and in Germany, never doing badly but never doing especially well,…