Fiction

  • The Visitor

    "Kitty Kushner's dying," Winters' wife said on the phone. "You'd better get right over." He sighed. Last week it had been a rape in the next block and, before that, two divorces in the Political Science Department. He looked up from his lecture notes on "Heuristic Programming and Artificial Intelligence," and settled the receiver on…

  • Walt Disney Presents

    Each of them holding a phone, at either end of the line. Bess is in her lap, watching the phone very carefully; he is leaning across his office desk on an elbow, frowning at the mouthpiece of the phone in his hand. "You really are a bastard, you know," she says to her phone. "I…

  • At St. Croix

    Peter Jackman and Jo Morrison were both divorced, and had been lovers since winter. She knew much about his marriage, as he did about hers, and at times it seemed to Peter that their love had grown only from shared pain. His ex-wife Norma, had married and moved to Colorado last summer, and he had…

  • With Richard in Claygate

    "Would you like to go and see the fields, Jenny?" Ellen asked her. They were clearing the breakfast plates into a sink full of soapy water when she said this, and the question seemed sudden and out of context. Jennifer supposed it was just a thoughtless question to break up the silence, for she realized…

  • A Length of Wire

    There was a man when I was fourteen who came to our house to dig out the ditch. I was at the age when boredom was as thick as the mud at the bottom of the river and everything – my mother, my father, the road, the house, the barn, all the trees that I…

  • Nothing to Write Home About

    Art Note      Painting a pear today, it occurs to me that what painting is really all about for me (at its best) is "discovery". The discovery of that third slight "bump" along-side the disappearing edge of the pear, which I had originally assumed was an almost straight line. However – the work itself eventually involved…

  • El Paso

    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…