Fiction

I I was always interested in myself, but I never thought I went back so far. Joan and I talked about birth almost as soon as we met. I told her I believed in the importance of early experience. "What do you mean by early," she asked, "before puberty, before loss of innocence?" "Before age…

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…

ONE Mary Ashlyn looked out the long narrow window and was surprised to see long narrow needles of brilliant rain falling wildly across her October garden. Brilliant long needles of flashing cruel rain, too bright, the sun was indeed still shining, and when Mary Ashlyn looked quickly at the sky, it was smooth and blue,…

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…

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 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…

(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 –…