Fiction

From Anecdotes from an alley "There's a fire at Voorthuyzen's bakery on Main Street," his father had said during breakfast. "A large blazing fire," he had added. Half an hour later he shuffled back, his head lowered. His father had laughed at him. His mother had found it childish that he responded so angrily to…

I have no photographs of my father. One hot Saturday in June, my camera slung over my shoulder, I take the subway from Greenwich Village to Chinatown. I switch to the M local which becomes an elevated train after it crosses the Williamsburg Bridge. I am going to Ridgewood, Queens, where I spent my childhood….

Mother said, "You know? – your father was an only child." The insight was not so much given as discarded. She brushed the sleeve of her housecoat across her brow. "You see," she gasped – and I saw quite vividly, although I was eight years old and still partially invisible; my invisibility enhanced Mother's soliloquies….

His son wore a moustache. Over and between tan faces and the backs of heads with hair cut high and short, and green-uniformed shoulders and chest and backs, Harry saw him standing with two other second lieutenants at the bar. His black moustache was thick. Only one woman was at happy hour, a blonde captain:…

(a novel-in-progress) After you struggle up Santa Monica thru all that thick stop and go traffic and racket, you make those turns and suddenly it's quiet. When you start seein more trees and tall hedges and high walls than you do people, then you know youre in Beverly Hills. At the gate I had to…

I. There was nothing she could do – she caught the boy red-handed. He was kneeling in front of a cabinet in the den (behind its sliding door their raggedy liquor collection and a pile of ancient magazines with their pages violated, torn out for urgent political purposes, covers disheveled), and he was apparently concentrating…

(from Palmares, a novel) "Did you rent me or buy me?" I dared to ask the silent Sobrieski. He said nothing as we walked across a banana grove toward a long squat building. Near it under palm trees were three slave huts, smaller and not as well constructed as the ones on Azevedo's plantation –…

(from a novel in progress) Everything has had youth. The two old dogs were lifted into their baskets lined with old wadded rags. If the old dogs were set down wrong, if their legs were folded too severely underneath them, the legs would fall asleep before the dogs would sleep, and in the morning the…

"Do you mind if I take my teeth out?" He grinned from the bathroom doorway. Lily leaned against the padded headboard, a fringe of green sheet draped across her breasts. "I try to be a gentleman at all times." His grin broadened to a leer. He would have pinched her buttock again. The left one…