Fiction

  • 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…

  • The Seasons

    Joy, who is now twenty-six years old, is waiting to conceive as if by accident a child with the man she loves. This will be irrefutable proof, she reasons, that she loves him and that they must marry. Though she has not believed in God for perhaps thirteen years she reasons too that conceiving a…

  • The Auction

    If you drive east out of Centerville on Highway 50, about seven or eight miles down the road you pass the waterworks. Go another mile or so and you've crossed Swan Creek; if it's summertime the stream will be low but steady, while in winter it will seem like a lake. Sometimes from the bridge…

  • Embarrassment

    A constable walked up and down on the pavement below the open windows. Inside, the party of eight had finished dinner and sat drinking brandy by the windows over-looking the Park. Someone in the room suggested that they each tell the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to them. The hostess spoke first, while…

  • Island

    From her place at the window she watched him, hatless, coatless, lead the mule to the wagon beneath an evenly gray sky. An empty pipe clamped between his teeth, he hitched the mule, and after she came out of the house, having kissed the children goodbye, he helped her up onto the wagon. She took…