Fiction

  • The Darkness of Love

    the darkness of love, in whose sweating memory all error is forced. – Amiri Baraka   DAY 1 When Handle woke at ten in the morning, he got up and walked to the far window. Hungover, he half expected the sound of traffic or the fading drone of an airliner as he lifted the window….

  • A Letter from the Sahara

    trans. Italian Ruth Feldman After an hour spent in the desert, I try to set down in writing everything that I have learned. When walking in the desert you have to keep your gaze on the ground all the time so as to study the position of each step; under your eyes you always have…

  • Fire Ants

    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…

  • Lord of Autumn

    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…

  • Tall Woman Love

    Beal comes in the night. "Auntie!" he says softly with his lips against the glass. The door is latched. Just a thin latch, not meant to keep out something big. Beal taps the glass with his knuckles. "Auntie! It's me!" Among the hairs of a young boy's beard, pimple scars have been carved, concave as…

  • Unity

    Gropius and I came to America in 1937 from England. We had been in London on a Leave of Absence permit from the German government and it was by no means certain that we would be allowed to return to claim our belongings, which were at the time in Berlin in care of my sister….

  • Slippage

    There is a child sitting next to me on this ratty old train, and he is more or less mine. Anyone watching us would not think us an unlikely pair. A young woman travelling with a seven year old kid. Her son, they would assume. I'm old enough, though I never can believe that I…

  • King of the Flowers

    A group of us were sitting around trying to think of nice things to say about my grandfather. He had died at ten o'clock that morning. So there we all were, gathered in my parents' living room. There was my mother, of course, She was Grandpa Jack's eldest child. And my father. And my mother's…

  • The Man in the Booth

    We didn't know he was dead until after the Gala was over. It was a small college-town fundraiser for the Opera Association, and it was held on the stage of the college theater – on the stage itself, so that we could see the control booth, located at the rear of the auditorium, up where…