Fiction

There was a man when I was fourteen who came to our house to dig out the ditch. I was at the age when boredom was as thick as the mud at the bottom of the river and everything – my mother, my father, the road, the house, the barn, all the trees that I…

Art Note      Painting a pear today, it occurs to me that what painting is really all about for me (at its best) is "discovery". The discovery of that third slight "bump" along-side the disappearing edge of the pear, which I had originally assumed was an almost straight line. However – the work itself eventually involved…

translated by Michael Steinberg It is stirring to observe how civilisation ever enlarges its dominion, how even from races otherwise untouched by higher education, talent emerges to hoist itself to remarkable heights. At the house of Privy Councillor of Commerce R., I made the acquaintance of a young man who unites to extraordinary gifts an…

DUDE See I'd met this old dirt farmer in a bar the night before. Said he was selling his truck cheap and I could come down to La Rosa and pick it up. Said $300 and it didn't run too bad but I'd better buy it now. So I hitched down Sunday morning, mud churches…

I got over to the side of the road as far as I could, into the grass and the weeds, but my father steered the car over that way, too. Through the windshield I could see his work hat, the shadow of his face and shoulders, the specks of light that were his glasses. I…

Flo knew the best way to kill a chicken and it was this. Hang it head downwards, hold on to it, and go in with your knife. Slit the roof of the mouth and the upper part of the beak. Go for the veins that cross each other at the back of the throat. If…

Ray, old buddy, one of the things I'll never be able to forget is the look on your face when you strolled into your bedroom and discovered me there with your wife. You were supposed to be away for the whole weekend with the Debate Team. Only they called it off, and so you got…

The story my father tells me is like the music one wants to make himself, or hears inside himself and nowhere else, elusive, as anything which is always present. He is here, seated on a rattan chair over which he has spread a sheet so that the rough, woven reeds won't snag his suit, a…

Hannah was her usual reticent self on the subject. "I don't trust them," was all she'd say. Reticent and cryptic. "What the hell you mean you don't trust them?" Brian kept asking her. "Nothing. I just don't trust them. That's all." Brian was trying to find his sneakers. Hannah was no help on that score…