Fiction

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…

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…