Fiction

The Lone Night Cantina was not a real cowboy bar. In those places, imagined Annie Wells, in those roadside joints outside of Cheyenne or Amarillo, just off a two-lane highway with pickups made in the good ol’ U.S. of A. parked in the dirt lot, the men angled their sweat-stained Stetsons over the eyes and…

I met Kazmir at Mrs. Malek's. He was a couple years older than I was, though only a grade ahead of me. His blond hair was just growing back from the baldy sour they'd given him after the school nurse found lice, and the deep, white-welted scar commemorating a fall from a second-story window when…

Jimmy returned from summer camp in love with fishing. He swam, played baseball, took riflery and even horseback riding, but passed his best days dangling a five-pound cat-gut line in the cold, blue lakes of Wisconsin. He was sad when camp ended and he said good-bye to Uncle Marv, the counselor who taught him fishing,…

Half-hidden in the kitchen's semi-darkness, Ira stood at a window, watching lights come on in a farmhouse across the road. He saw her figure framed in yellow light, and then she slowly drifted away. Christmas tree lights came on pulsing, casting shadows, dappling the snow outside. Beyond her house the sky hung low on a…

How was it that Myott came to understand the nature of his hands? It happened like this. Even as a child he was, by temperament, a shy, gentle boy, quiet and self-contained, one not given to coveting the marginal compensations offered by an increasingly noisy and unprincipled world. His mother, who managed a religious bookstore…

Not Jane Eyre again. Other people are moving on in life or going around in circles or failing utterly, but I'm still doing business at the same old stand. Every year a new load of students is dumped like laundry in front of me, needing to know Jane Eyre. Sometimes I take comfort in the…

In Manik Sen's dream, the monsoons had begun. Thick drops of water fell tumultuously through the dark and the wind swung around in circles, from land to river to land. At first, in his dream, Manik was a child out in the rain, trying to gather the falling drops in his small palms. He let…

Inside the main entrance to Greenwood, "A Home for Retired Professionals," young Dr. Rogers came face to face with two tiny women in long, blue bathrobes with pointy hoods. They were peering suspiciously at him from behind the desk. "Who's that, Livvie?" the shorter one said. "Never saw him before in my life. Who are…

To begin warily, let us say this has to do with words, the appalling paucity, herself talking to herself when she was accustomed to the daily slap and tickle within the ebb of routine. But he was away now visiting his father who was, as they said, fragile, a word she said to herself as…