Fiction

Tommy Priola is on the mound, brother of curve ball specialist Nick, and I am at the plate waiting for the first pitch of the game. I am in the process of examining a singular event in my life. Priola, unlike his brother, is a right-hander and his usual position is that of catcher. I'm…

The smell of the hospital worked at John Latham as he rode the elevator up. Childhood fears had been implanted; the hospital air was still always hard for him to breathe. It was not easier this afternoon. The drive had been long and hot enough to steepen his hatred. He really had known better than…

Jane and I left Jack Essler’s land office determined, relieved, and grateful for our new sense of direction. We skipped across the street in the rain to the post office, where we found two letters and a small check from Miss Ellen waiting for us. From the postmaster we learned of a boat the blacksmith…

In 1939, both his parents dead and buried, in the Army Air Corps in basic training, Camel lay on his back and stared up at a wool blanket which hung down from the bunk above his and shaded him from the bright barracks light. As a boy he had lain under the low limbs of…

The first time I listened to a radio my friend Pelly drowned. My family – mother, cousin Jenny, father and I – lived, quite isolated, near Paduola Lake in northern Manitoba. Jenny, a pretty five years old when orphaned over to us, had hair black as birch knotholes, and the staccato yet elegant movements of…

They own no dogs; the maid sleeps out. The catches on the windows are those old-fashioned brass ones, butterfly locks. No alarm system or fancy security. He memorized everything Nick had to tell about this job. He pulls on black cotton gloves, soft and close like ladies' gloves. He is no longer just a man…

My mother had been a debutante. She had renounced her frivolous nature when she met my father, who was a scholar, and had once demonstrated to her the purity of his soul by pronouncing boogie woogie with soft g's. They rushed to get married before the war because they assumed he would be sent abroad….

"Hurry up! Can't you drive any faster?" "I do and we'll land in a ditch!" A madeup moon, my mother's frantic face, bobbed over the gray upholstery horizon of the Studebaker seat. "You, Bette! Move your head! Your neck's not stiff, is it? Is it?" "Now take it easy, honey," my father's voice soothed. "Take…

Last night I was seduced. "Lord," you must think, "this I've heard before." But then I could be wrong. I constantly overestimate my powers of intuition. Some days I walk to my store, my small shoebox of a bookshop, and feel the women near the bus stop stare at my balding head, my cracked shoes…