Fiction

SWEETIES Once when I was very bad and bit several of the Debrosses girls in the afternoon, Madame Debrosse hung a notice round my neck that said, "Watch out, Sophie bites." She told Maman I should be made to wear white gloves like her girls; it is so they will not touch anything dirty in…

from Island Lives Although this memoir honors an Original and only secondarily anatomizes an Adventuress, the fellow traveller will want to know why I wished to kill my father, Philip Turner, who was not even a bad sort. For the answer we must look down my private fork of the Kaplan-Turner genealogy, back to the…

She had first seen him wearing sweat socks bunched down between the first and second toes of each foot to accommodate black rubber thongs. She associated this foot garb vaguely and incorrectly with an Eastern religion. She noticed he was prettier than she. He was nice to her because he was nice, and she imagined…

Only Colors The little green car came down the hill with a natural parabolic kind of grace, like a sandwich cookie rolling down a string someone has stretched from an upstairs window to the corner of a garage. Only, who was wading barefoot in a stream as wide as a sidewalk that ran along the…

Charlie Kelly was her eighth lover since the divorce. He was standing naked in silhouette, as slim as a stiletto in the light from the hall, rifling through the pockets in his jacket for his cigarettes. The sight of him gave Kate no pleasure. She hated the smell of cigarette smoke in her bedroom. She…

"I've decided," he says, as Deena's step brings her to the kitchen, "to take the toaster with me. Because it was my toaster, remember, and besides, you can use the oven to toast bread or muffins, or whatever you want to. It's easy, I can show you. You set it at three-hundred -" But her…

My mother was in the midst of making the beds. The windows were thrown open and the sheets and blankets and pillows were piled up on top of the radiator cover in front of the open windows. A vigorous bedmaker, my mother stripped the beds of their sheets and blankets with an assaultiveness that was…

Elaine looked once more into the mirror, pushing her cheek up with her fingers into a forlorn, lopsided smile. Her palms were wet from brushing her hair. The locker room smelled of rain. The lights flickered; thunder crashed and the sky turned violet. She wiped her palms on her leotard. I can't dance; the dance…

I am a fictional character. However, you would be in error to smile smugly, feeling ontologically superior. For you are a fictional character, too. All my readers are except one who is, properly, not reader but author. I am a fictional character; this is not, however, a work of fiction, no more so than any…