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…

(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…