Fiction

She had kept the bottle stuck down inside a basket of clothes that needed ironing, and throughout the course of the day whenever she had a chance to walk through the back room where the basket was kept, she would stop for the odd sip or two. By the middle of the afternoon, she had…

Gordon He pressed the side of his face to the pillow and waited for the sound of birds. The room was black, the window open; when a breeze came the curtains billowed out against a lighter sky. He heard the clock. He heard the dry sound of Helen breathing; there was a sigh and a…

Fenton plugged in the coffee maker, primed and loaded the night before, then went to the front door to get the paper. The sun was up above the Patterson's garage, and the newspaper had landed on the top step, neatly folded and tucked. Fenton stood and smelled the air. Through the bathroom window on the…

The woman standing at the right is Alice Fitzsimons Coffey. Those in the portrait with her knew her as Allie, but I think of her as Mama. Her black hair is pulled away from her face and secured at the crown of her head. Her mouth is straight, and her cheeks, even in this old…

I'm not sure where it all began. Perhaps it was "Hure, hare, hure, commencement," a game my sisters Debo and Decca organized when we were quite small. Or, I should say, when they were quite small. I was never small and they always organized all the games. I don't know. Perhaps they were cleverer than…

The day after Thanksgiving my mother was arrested outside the front doors of the J.C. Penney's, Los Angeles, and when I went to get her I considered leaving her at the security desk. I thought I wanted her in jail. I wasn't surprised – I'd known all along she was a thief. Small things: a…

He wanted, above all, to crack The New Yorker. He could not deal in the right things, a lorgnette, an Italian garden, a grandmother, Mexico. Mexico is perfect because it is a proximate paradise. Situations come undone without the vexation that Europe can sometimes bring. The New Yorker watches for mise en scene. You feel…

It was one of those pearl-soft days when the sky drifts in broken ridges of gray. I was on my way up the coast, planning to winter over in one of the waterfront towns on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island. It was mid-November. I had been out since early spring. I hoped to find…

The woman across the street bends over to pull a weed from her front steps. I set a fresh cup of coffee on the Help Wanted section and watch from my second-story kitchen window. She is married to a surgeon. It's a two-Mercedes family. She and the surgeon have two daughters. One married a lawyer…