Fiction

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…

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…

I "His sentence hung over him like the sword of Damocles." I am reading aloud from Lester Schwabb's paper. "That's dreadful," I say, looking up. "What a way to begin a story!" Lester Schwabb is working away at his peeling lips. Everyone else is smiling. They love it when I abuse Lester Schwabb. I shouldn't,…

(from a novel to be called: Nothing Happens in Carmincross) Below them is the sweep of the valley, widening from nothing in the grey-brown mountains down to deep green pasture-land. The river winds in the most approved style. The farmhouses are square and white and solid. No poverty in this part of the world. Never…