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…

(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…

One day the physician Oberdorfer approached Kepler with a stealthy smile and – could it be? – a wink, and invited him to come on a certain day to the house of Herr Georg Hartmann von Stubenberg, a merchant of the town. Kepler did not know the man, but he went, thinking he was to…

Translations is set in a hedge-school, a kind of ad hoc classical academy, in an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal. It is late August 1833, and at this time the British Army is conducting the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland. The two short extracts that follow are from the first half of Act Two. Lieutenant…

He shuttles from me, in Boston, to ex-wife and baby, in Baltimore, to me, to baby. He vacations three weeks alone with baby. He wants to get to know baby. He wants custody of baby. And when he gets custody (last month he shattered a tea cup to prove how certain he is of getting…

Not many years after Professor Alleman began his teaching career, he had a pretty and rambunctious nun as a student. She told him nothing was worth aiming for except sainthood. When he first heard this opinion, he scoffed gravely, arguing that this might be her personal truth but that it had little merit as a…

The van was always cool, even on the hottest days, and when they started it grew cooler still as the wind whipped through the open windows and pelted his naked body. It delighted Isaac to be up so high and to be going so fast, to look down on pedestrians dawdling by the roadside, then…

They collided south of Nashville, J. Fielding Mount, the accidental man, and his counterpart, Malvina T., the accidental woman. She was headed north and he was headed south, and the switching systems that operate in the senses of these fugitive types failed somehow in the darkness. Or possibly it was an accident meant to happen….