Fiction

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,…

When the car came into sight from in front of the barn, it had already picked up dust, the wheels and shiny hubcaps going round, the windows rolled up tight. Two women sat in the front seat, their hair in silver curls, their powdered faces perfectly still behind the bright glass. The car left the…

The silent train ascended through forest and alongside a torrent so cold and so swift the water was white, and small white birds flew up like spray. On a bridge undergoing repairs the train came to a halt. Just outside Thomas Lang’s window, a workman in a black knit cap was hammering at a railing,…

It is morning. After Lena has stripped Marigold's udder and strained the goat's milk into the refrigerator jug; after she has fed the horses and the dogs; and after she has shooed Evvie's gander off the lawn to the edge of the fire pond and scattered a handful of grain there to keep him interested,…

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…