Fiction

Butch, determined to wait out the cold, took a stool near the end of the bar, away from the cluster of regulars gathered where they could see the Motorola TV. His back was only two feet from the front window. He could feel the cold seeping through the glass, hear the mean wind off Lake…

DUDE See I'd met this old dirt farmer in a bar the night before. Said he was selling his truck cheap and I could come down to La Rosa and pick it up. Said $300 and it didn't run too bad but I'd better buy it now. So I hitched down Sunday morning, mud churches…

I got over to the side of the road as far as I could, into the grass and the weeds, but my father steered the car over that way, too. Through the windshield I could see his work hat, the shadow of his face and shoulders, the specks of light that were his glasses. I…

Flo knew the best way to kill a chicken and it was this. Hang it head downwards, hold on to it, and go in with your knife. Slit the roof of the mouth and the upper part of the beak. Go for the veins that cross each other at the back of the throat. If…

Ray, old buddy, one of the things I'll never be able to forget is the look on your face when you strolled into your bedroom and discovered me there with your wife. You were supposed to be away for the whole weekend with the Debate Team. Only they called it off, and so you got…

The story my father tells me is like the music one wants to make himself, or hears inside himself and nowhere else, elusive, as anything which is always present. He is here, seated on a rattan chair over which he has spread a sheet so that the rough, woven reeds won't snag his suit, a…

Hannah was her usual reticent self on the subject. "I don't trust them," was all she'd say. Reticent and cryptic. "What the hell you mean you don't trust them?" Brian kept asking her. "Nothing. I just don't trust them. That's all." Brian was trying to find his sneakers. Hannah was no help on that score…

           J. O. BEALE J. O. Beale is a horse's ass which anyone can see he smells like something in the grass I couldn't finish the thought because I couldn't find the rhyme, though I wrote seven or eight rhyming words in the margin: free, sea, be, tree, me. Even Don key. None of them…

I want to tell you about the undoing of a man. I did not know him very well. It is only the conditions that led directly to his collapse that I know well enough, the handful of episodes that seem to me pertinent. I in fact was present at the critical moment – when matters…