Fiction

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…

"To dream with one eye open. . . ." Santayana Sometimes the three of them would awaken simultaneously and lie still under the pique coverlets, watching the light seep through the curtains until they were suffused. Or close their eyes against the light, remembering and reinventing. There was, of course, no way to prove the…

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…

On the day that his brother Nachman died, Nathan Malkin, a wealthy sixty-four year old American, was walking along the beach of a nature sanctuary in Israel. He did not find out about his brother's death until three days later, when he returned to his home in Ein Karem, a small village near Jerusalem, and…

I used to dislike shopping, the rushing to too many stores, all the details to remember. Now it's almost pleasant. I shop in the morning when the stores are uncrowded and the early light gleams off the beige brick and glass of the store-fronts. Since Joshua and Miriam are grown and gone, there's less to…

It was her second marriage and Karen sat at the round table in Marblehead with her new family, listening to their conversation and thinking of what her first husband would see, if he was there. He would notice, she thought, my new mother-in-law's enormous diamond, and he would see this new father-in-law's yachting jacket, and…

Used as he was to announcing his arrival triumphantly, no matter how late at night, the homecoming captain in his winter uniform searched the thick ivy growth on the pillar of the gate, and as he felt the marble cavity around the electric bell, he pushed that bell and kept pushing it, until he heard…