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…

At St. Croix

Peter Jackman and Jo Morrison were both divorced, and had been lovers since winter. She knew much about his marriage, as he did about hers, and at times it seemed to Peter that their love had grown only from shared pain. His ex-wife Norma, had married and moved to Colorado last summer, and he had…

With Richard in Claygate

"Would you like to go and see the fields, Jenny?" Ellen asked her. They were clearing the breakfast plates into a sink full of soapy water when she said this, and the question seemed sudden and out of context. Jennifer supposed it was just a thoughtless question to break up the silence, for she realized…