Fiction

The Sayings of Mr. Purple

None of his friends could say what made Purple tick. He had an observable routine, the same as a number of others from the British colony in this Costa Del Sol fishing village cum retirement-tourist village: coffee and red wine to wake up in the morning (1 or 2 in the afternoon) at the Calle…

The Right Bread and the Left

It must have been a lucrative deal with CARE, the Red Cross, U.N.R.A., or was it the Marshall Plan? by which Uncle Jimmis, remembering the old country, sailed from New York with a shipload of flour for the hungry. The occupation had been over for more than two years, but the civil war still regard….

Bunco

Mrs. Endsley was paid to keep everyone happy. Her latest project involved composing a Conwoody Convalescent song, something on the order of a school song, but with some of the parts left out. And it was in her line of duty that, on a Wednesday in early May, just before supper, she smacked her little…

Northern Light

Almost overnight the summer had disappeared. The morning I was to leave for the cottage and meet Peter there was a damp, north wind, and constellations of leaves flattened on the sidewalk two stories below seemed strangely three-dimensional. I wasn't sure if I were staring or looking. I had been thinking about one of my…

Bluegill

Hello my little bluegill, little shark face. Fanged one, sucker, hermaphrodite. Rose, bloom in the fog of the body; see how the gulls arch over us, singing their raucous squalls. They bring you sweet meats, tiny mice, spiders with clasped legs. In their old claws, claws of eons, reptilian sleep, they cradle shiny rocks and…

The Visitor

"Kitty Kushner's dying," Winters' wife said on the phone. "You'd better get right over." He sighed. Last week it had been a rape in the next block and, before that, two divorces in the Political Science Department. He looked up from his lecture notes on "Heuristic Programming and Artificial Intelligence," and settled the receiver on…

Walt Disney Presents

Each of them holding a phone, at either end of the line. Bess is in her lap, watching the phone very carefully; he is leaning across his office desk on an elbow, frowning at the mouthpiece of the phone in his hand. "You really are a bastard, you know," she says to her phone. "I…