Fiction

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…

Essentially, he wrote, my life has been a burst of failure. Success lies in a political act, but the best he could think of at the moment was sabotage, putting sugar in his neighbor's gas tank. The Mercedes would shine on the outside, but the guts would be corroded. He considered his need to find…

To whom it should concern: Lucky for me you're not the worrying sort. Lucky for you I don't write often, considering the miseries I'm heir(ess) to. Also my terror and loss. What I need to know is, Where do I/we stand? Grammar and punctuation aside – for I have not for-gotten those shockwaves you suffer…

They were leaving the harbor on power, against the flow of vessels putting in for the night. Across the water they could hear sharp bleats of compressed-air horns as people signaled from yachts to be brought ashore by the club launch. It was six o'clock on a calm Friday evening in August, the last weekend…

The farm market, earlier all leaf lettuce and sugar peas, has gone to parsnip, potatoes, winter squash. And apples, dropping on the roadway, mixing with days of rain into thick slush as V. approaches the green market kiosk. FARM-FRESH EGGS PIE APPLES POTATOS The soft-spoken farmer follows where she points, bags beets, eggplant. He hands…

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…