Fiction

Nothing ever seemed to go right for the 57th Division. It had come overseas just in time to take heavy casualties in the Battle of the Bulge; then, too-quickly strengthened with masses of new replacements, it had plodded through further combat in eastern France and in Germany, never doing badly but never doing especially well,…

When you are young you are two-dimensional. Everything has a front and a back, but there is no depth. When you turn sideways to examine something, you skitter and fall like a kite. So Kimball thought when he started teaching college thirty years ago, at a time when business was good and teachers were scarce….

He stood with his cap in his hand, very conscious of the mud on his wellingtons because she had somehow suddenly looked down at them as if they smelled. She stood with her hand on the key in the door, her school books under her arm, looking directly at him so that he dropped his…

He told me, at eleven, that he was angry at women and though he didn't blame them exactly, he'd been driven to the point where he just made himself presentable enough to get laid once in awhile. I thought he was very presentable and I wasn't surprised when I found out later in the evening…

Made a fool of. She rose to that. She would not be made a fool of. She looked down at the tennis court. She couldn't hear any of their noises through the window. The girl was good, played like a man, concentrating, sweating. Coiled for her backhand. Whipped it across with top spin. He had…

In the memory, he was six. Maybe five, maybe seven. But it wasn't a memory he'd invited; it had stepped up to him as unexpectedly and indifferently as – as what? The thought faltered. Here was the memory in any event, so clear because it was unsolicited; it hung before him as detached as the…

(Chapter Seven begins with the return of a white sixth grade girl named Mary to her school on the edge of Harlem, after a Christmas marred by fighting between her father and stepmother. During her first months at the school Mary's own withdrawnness, her race, and an episode in which she "ratted" on other children,…

About four that afternoon the thunder and lightning began again. The five women seated about Mrs. Boone's one-room apartment grew still and spoke with lowered voices and in whispers, when they spoke at all: they were no longer young, and they had all been raised to believe that such weather was the closest thing to…

Because of the shabby character of the boy's mother, and also that of the man she had married the very day she found herself legally divorced and able to marry again, and because the two had determined to live far away from New Hampshire without even bothering to send him their address until several years…