Fiction

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:…

Dawn. Ice. Light. Third dawn in the season of ice. For the third time we submitted ourselves to the cold and cramped interior of the black carriage, and in most respects this ride, though shorter, was like the last: Bel Esprit was again dressed in red and wore her hat; Seigneur and I were hooded;…

* Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center. After looking through a loose-leaf binder with photographs of cakes taped onto the pages, she ordered chocolate, the child’s favorite. The cake she chose was decorated with a space ship and launching pad under a sprinkling of white stars at one end of…

Two people stood quarreling in the Casket Showing Room. They were a sixty-three-year-old man named Marlyn Huutula and his unmarried sister Estona. She was so angry that she bent towards him from her end of the coffin. "You really ought to keep your grimy hands out of that clean quilting!" Estona told him in a…

1 Erroll, the deputy who was known to litter, did not toss any Fresca cans or Old King Cole bags out this night. Erroll brought his Jeep to a stop in the yard right behind Lenny Cobb’s brand new Dodge pickup. The brakes of Erroll, the deputy’s, Jeep made a spiritless dusky squeak. Erroll was…

     (from a novel in progress) The sleep of reason brings forth monsters. Francisco Goya He lay prone on the rutted stone path, his bare torso raised and supported by his right forearm, while his left arm and open hand reached vainly toward the empty cave where late had rested the dead body of the Christ…

(from a novel in progress) Maurice Pelletier, four years old, stood in front of an armoire mirror practicing his solo tap routine to "Anchors Aweigh." No music played. He mouthed the words silently with tiny cherub lips and his ordinary house shoes made muffled slaps on the carpet. He wore a white sailor suit and…