Fiction

He was a piece of trash from the first, not to be taken seriously. He arrived in the colony together with his wife, a heavy woman, and two daughters who were, one later learned, twins but not the identical kind. They seemed good enough girls, quiet and formless, pre-adolescent. But the parents were, each in…

Holding my New York Times unfolded in front of me, now and then glancing up with considerable casual effect, as if deeply engrossed in thought, I carefully looked him over. I didn't want him to know that he'd been recognized. Naturally. He was well-groomed, which at first surprised me, but then I quickly understood. His…

You may wonder why there are so few of us. It could probably be explained from the point of view of evolution regarding us as either freak mutations or freak adaptations. Besides it always seems to be a terrible life squalid or obsessive or sterile. Full of evasions of some reallife marriages. Marriages seldom occur…

Drawings Winners to be announced The prisoner. He had been in long enough, accused for others gain, tried by a court of men who had forgotten how to live, and convicted in innocence by a jury who were hungry for delicacies. In prison he was taught to appear guilty so he wouldn't suffer the hatred…

A painter sat down at his table with a dusty canvas before him. On the other side of his studio, his easels stood like a forest. Each one represented a birthday or Christmas in which a relative had come up with the perfect gift. But because he was the type of artist that liked to…

Little Bertha Venation would have been the most exquisite young woman of her century, were it not for her distressing tendancy to cheat on her lovers with other men, for a yes, for a no, sometimes not even for a yes or a no. At the time this story begins, her lover was a splendid…

My father is in New York but I don't see him until the last day of his trip East. Business, he says, Business. Just the same though I look for him on every street corner, in all the bars along Lexington Avenue, and bent low, almost to my knees, I search the taxis along Fifth…

After three years, eleven months, and two days service, Corporal Fitzgerald re-enlisted for six years, collected a re-enlistment bonus and, that same afternoon, went to the bank in Oceanside and paid the balance of the note of his 1959 Chevrolet which was four years old. He had thought that would make him feel good, but…

So there he perched, a poor sad slob of a young failure, Marvin Gardens, Ph.D., pondering in the deadest center of his ambiguities. Two years past, to the day, he had assessed his life from that identical spot – the large stuffed chair in his small study (not yet, then, had greyish stuffing begun to…