Fiction

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…

Everything is in the bag. Everything.       Orange shawl necklace chemise cigar garter belt string banana umbrella sweater button superball duck socks             No. Incomplete.             Moldy half orange, torn yellowed shawl, pink rayon chemise, frayed flowered garter belt, two pieces of string…

The press pass gets you in the door. You have a friend who works for Action News and he owes you for the time he took the MG out to Westchester and hit a ten-point buck deer. You know people who have been hunting for twenty years and have never seen a ten point buck….

I have worked at the bus station magazine stand since nineteen fifty three, waiting for the right girl to come along. When I took this job, the paint on that wall over there was new; it was a light green color then. The servicemen from the Korean War would stop and buy cigarets, and I…

In early June my father drove us west in the Chevy station wagon. I turned eleven in Yellowstone National Park. For my birthday I got an Indian headdress and a tom-tom with a black rubber drumhead. I felt that I was too old for that. By the time we reached Seattle, we had broken down…

He and his companion had escaped the streets of War for the day, and he followed the older boy by several yards. They had made the deciduous woodland, accompanied by the Kentucky and worm-eating warblers, and had come to the spruce-fir line. Somewhere from its domed ground nest an ovenbird passed itself off as a…