Fiction

That’s what his profile said. My attraction to it was the latest in a string of developments to alert me that I was getting old. The other big ones lately had been the movement from few enough gray hairs to pluck to too many to count; the affinity for houseplants; the humorless fear of the…

Early mornings, we trudge single file along a snowy footpath, nerves tingling, anticipating our destination: a frozen, arena-size lake in the middle of the woods. The trail is part of Coach Yablonski’s fifty-acre estate, and the only other footprints crisscrossing the snow are from the hooves of deer and elk, paws of mountain lion, scurrying…

Once, we were blameless, we women of Corinth. We watched over our children within our mudbrick walls, teaching the boys to play and the girls to please. We ground the grain in the kitchen till the wheat dust covered our cheeks. We wove the cloth in the workroom, pulling and twisting and winding the soft…

You know my husband. He’s the handsome, forty-something guy who looks curated from the pages of Modern Dad magazine. You’ll spot him outside the currently over-hyped café. He’ll almost spill his thimble of gourmet coffee on his cream-colored loafers, and one single frown line will appear at the corner of his lips. He’ll tug at…

The handshake haunts him. Those fingers continue to brush against his palm. The grip crushes his knuckles, yet surely there was also warmth? Even sincerity? Certainly, the flexing hold of those vice-like fingers had communicated some shock, some force. A sudden blooming of an inner light, even a sting of humanity? Rufus would like to…

I was standing on the packing line when I overheard it. Apparently, Bettie Page was in San Bernardino. The information came from Jim Wake, a man I’ve never particularly liked, but after hearing him swear up and down that the former pinup was actually around, I decided to join the conversation. “What the hell are…

Cenk checked his Rolex as he waited for his car. It was past 11:00 p.m. The glass over the black dial with silver numbers reflected the multicolored lights from the towering Boğaziçi Bridge, which was less than two hundred meters away and dominated the skyline. The changing lights zigzagged like the pattern on a backgammon…

We moved out here only five months ago, and I remain haunted by the feeling that the whole process was in some way too easy. Thirty-plus years brushed away, as if they had not been the key years of our family life. All that time had been given, had befallen us. The transition itself seemed…

Since I was a child, I’ve had nightmares of annihilation. Though they disappeared in my twenties, they resurfaced here and there in my thirties, and in my forties, they became frequent. Sometimes they were tied to world events; other times to stresses at work, in life. During that very long year, they involved being trapped…