Fiction

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,…

When you are young you are two-dimensional. Everything has a front and a back, but there is no depth. When you turn sideways to examine something, you skitter and fall like a kite. So Kimball thought when he started teaching college thirty years ago, at a time when business was good and teachers were scarce….

He stood with his cap in his hand, very conscious of the mud on his wellingtons because she had somehow suddenly looked down at them as if they smelled. She stood with her hand on the key in the door, her school books under her arm, looking directly at him so that he dropped his…

He told me, at eleven, that he was angry at women and though he didn't blame them exactly, he'd been driven to the point where he just made himself presentable enough to get laid once in awhile. I thought he was very presentable and I wasn't surprised when I found out later in the evening…