Fiction

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…

Baby

He shuttles from me, in Boston, to ex-wife and baby, in Baltimore, to me, to baby. He vacations three weeks alone with baby. He wants to get to know baby. He wants custody of baby. And when he gets custody (last month he shattered a tea cup to prove how certain he is of getting…

The Martyr

Not many years after Professor Alleman began his teaching career, he had a pretty and rambunctious nun as a student. She told him nothing was worth aiming for except sainthood. When he first heard this opinion, he scoffed gravely, arguing that this might be her personal truth but that it had little merit as a…