Fiction

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…

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…

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…

Fenton plugged in the coffee maker, primed and loaded the night before, then went to the front door to get the paper. The sun was up above the Patterson's garage, and the newspaper had landed on the top step, neatly folded and tucked. Fenton stood and smelled the air. Through the bathroom window on the…

The woman standing at the right is Alice Fitzsimons Coffey. Those in the portrait with her knew her as Allie, but I think of her as Mama. Her black hair is pulled away from her face and secured at the crown of her head. Her mouth is straight, and her cheeks, even in this old…

I'm not sure where it all began. Perhaps it was "Hure, hare, hure, commencement," a game my sisters Debo and Decca organized when we were quite small. Or, I should say, when they were quite small. I was never small and they always organized all the games. I don't know. Perhaps they were cleverer than…

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…

Old man Trainer, they say, has finally gone around the bend. As he rides his Italian ten-speed bicycle down the long slope of curving asphalt roadway toward Red Branch, the farm women watch from their orchards, from screened veranda porches, and they say it: he's crazy. They shake their heads sadly. He's loopy, they say….

"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….