Fiction

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….

Harrison had eaten a fly in spite of himself. Others had bounced off his goggles or his Adam's apple. He hadn't exactly swallowed the bug, but he had a grim hunch that some of the horny parts had found their way down his gullet. He spat, making a sort of Bronx cheer, then slowed and…

First I was 76. We had been assigned numbers to be taped on our helmets, front and back, with masking tape. But on the first morning I lost my number. A cadre member walked down each long file of men, standing in front of one, then the next, then the next, down the line. This…

In the car, his immense and hairless hands melding with the steering wheel, David accelerated into the bank of the curve, weight shifting, the outside wheels lifting, giddying him for a moment with gravity's loss, caught as if in a morning dream of flight, his fear giving way to intimations of immortality; not an idea…

They were out coursing on Sunday a last time together but they did not know it, the two friends, James Sharkey and Tom Lennon, a teacher and an agricultural instructor. The weak winter sun had thawed the fields soft enough to course the hare on, and though it still hung blood-orange above the hawthorns on…

None of his friends could say what made Purple tick. He had an observable routine, the same as a number of others from the British colony in this Costa Del Sol fishing village cum retirement-tourist village: coffee and red wine to wake up in the morning (1 or 2 in the afternoon) at the Calle…

from his apartment on Ferrell Anderson Place he liked to walk down to the quai which the local inhabitants referred to as The Reiser for reasons Carl was not able to determine but he somehow always lost his way on the way and found himself in a puzzle of winding and oblique streets complicated intersections…

It must have been a lucrative deal with CARE, the Red Cross, U.N.R.A., or was it the Marshall Plan? by which Uncle Jimmis, remembering the old country, sailed from New York with a shipload of flour for the hungry. The occupation had been over for more than two years, but the civil war still regard….