Fiction

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…

           J. O. BEALE J. O. Beale is a horse's ass which anyone can see he smells like something in the grass I couldn't finish the thought because I couldn't find the rhyme, though I wrote seven or eight rhyming words in the margin: free, sea, be, tree, me. Even Don key. None of them…

I want to tell you about the undoing of a man. I did not know him very well. It is only the conditions that led directly to his collapse that I know well enough, the handful of episodes that seem to me pertinent. I in fact was present at the critical moment – when matters…

Sweeping the decks. That was the start of it all for me. That was when I said to myself, It's really begun; we're launched now; no turning back. I was very nearly sick to my stomach. There were other times, of course. Earlier signals. Moments when I could feel something had happened, could feel the…

"`The loss of clothing,'" Grent reads, "`implies free fall.'" I write this down. He pauses, scanning the page. "`In this general area a thumb was found hanging on a twig.'" I write this down. "`Whom we felt conclusively to be a member of the crew because the tissue was intimately associated with the control panel.'"…

Gracie turned on her side to look at the clock. She could tell by the way the sun struck the window and glowed through the frozen gauze around the bottom of the pane that a hard frost had come at last, that fall was beginning to be what it should be. All night the wind…