Fiction

for S.H. Not once in forty years have I gone without a meal or slept without a roof over my head. I’ve known less deprivation than anyone I know. My father died two months before I was born, it is true, and my daughter passed away before she ever spoke a word. But it’s hard…

I was old enough to know I wouldn't want to hear. But I didn't know what I would find out. So, I went along for the ride. The first colored person I knew was my maid, Marion. She had baggy eyes, baggy breasts, and a bad complexion. My mother made Marion tunafish sandwiches every day…

Poor Bernie, Ted thought, as rain thudded against the car like rotten fruit. Watching it stream and bubble on the windshield he promised himself not to complain about it lest Bernie's feelings be hurt. He was anxious to impress this on his wife. Poor Bernie, he said aloud. Things never work out the way he…

Once there was an honest man. He was a well driller. His eyes had filled with the first two wells of his life and after he could see through the surface of the earth to water awaiting his rig, not with his eyes but something like memory already there. What others called imagination the well…

He stood in the shadows as usual, as Charlotte had come to expect. He was a part, by now, of the quiet late afternoon street that gathered her in when the working day was over. It was dusk, early spring. The air was warmish, and as Charlotte rounded the corner she could smell the honeysuckle,…

During the winter of 1955, Chris took courses at Columbia. He came from Indianapolis; New York stunned him. Knowing nothing, he took a room in a railroad flat uptown near school: one room, 11 x 7, bed with a defeated mattress. It was cheap, and he could use the kitchen along with the three other…

There was such a strain on the silence between them after he'd eaten that it had to be broken. `Maybe we should never have given up the farm and come here. Even though we had no one to pass it on to,' Michael said, his head of coarse white hair leaning away from his wife…

A white thing floated near the wharf, like a tangle of intestines with a single wrinkled eye in the middle and a mouth. Three couples in weekend clothes stood in a row and frowned at its undulations with intense silent interest, then dislike. "What is it?" said one of the wives. The boat cast off…

Once she had been a photographer. Now as she hears the shutter click across the room, too loud, Helen wonders why it should be her husband who takes these family pictures when she is the one with the skills. She knows what the finished pictures will show: a stylishly thin woman, her four handsome sons…