Fiction

  • Fathers

    "Why don't we forget about the ball," the young woman said. "Why don't you just take a drop?" The man, considerably older, was in the short rough just off the seventh fairway. He was walking carefully, looking down, swinging the head of a two-iron across the tops of wild flowers. "It's a Titleist," he said….

  • The Loneliness Quiz

    You say that if I have comments on any of the questions I can write them on a separate piece of paper and send it with my answers. I have decided to do that. Question 1. I have checked these-      a. 55-60 (I'm 57)      b. Female      c. Suburbs      d. $20,000-$25,000 (I think that's right)      e….

  • Hog-Killing Weather

    There are those images that lie around at the back of your mind, not demanding much attention and rarely getting any, sort of fossilized, as you might say. Then one morning, a bitter November morning, something catches the edge of your eye, still smoky with sleep, and you sit up in bed and squint into…

  • Offices of Instruction

    When my mother read to us, her voice wasn't like a woman's voice. She sat on the couch and read chapters from long books. It was night, and my father was at work. He took the violin wrapped in chamois in the leather case and played at the hotel in the city. He walked across…

  • Bag Ladies Never Beg

    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…

  • Amanda

    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….

  • Wedding Night

    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…

  • Cumberland Spring

    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…