Fiction

The air at the bottom of the garden was damp, but when Cecilia Lofton opened the gate, a gust of the chergui, loaded with needles of hot sand, struck her in the face. Raising her hand defensively, she squinted down the dusty road that meandered among scrubby palms and shacks of tin and cardboard until…

She is sitting in the car and I do my number. Looking down the sight I see an auriole fly to the right and left, all around in haloed flutters. Then it wavers like underwater noons, I have to split, my Uncle doesn’t wait. He says be back, be quick, be reverant. We pray for…

It is late afternoon, the Sunday before Labor Day. Paul looks over the classroom assigned to him and then goes outside, down the steps into summer heat and sun. In the middle of the dusty street, a girl with long legs leans into a car, talking with the driver. She balances on tiptoe and her…

for S.H. Not once in forty years have I gone without a meal or slept without a roof over my head. I’ve known less deprivation than anyone I know. My father died two months before I was born, it is true, and my daughter passed away before she ever spoke a word. But it’s hard…

I was old enough to know I wouldn't want to hear. But I didn't know what I would find out. So, I went along for the ride. The first colored person I knew was my maid, Marion. She had baggy eyes, baggy breasts, and a bad complexion. My mother made Marion tunafish sandwiches every day…

Poor Bernie, Ted thought, as rain thudded against the car like rotten fruit. Watching it stream and bubble on the windshield he promised himself not to complain about it lest Bernie's feelings be hurt. He was anxious to impress this on his wife. Poor Bernie, he said aloud. Things never work out the way he…

Once there was an honest man. He was a well driller. His eyes had filled with the first two wells of his life and after he could see through the surface of the earth to water awaiting his rig, not with his eyes but something like memory already there. What others called imagination the well…

He stood in the shadows as usual, as Charlotte had come to expect. He was a part, by now, of the quiet late afternoon street that gathered her in when the working day was over. It was dusk, early spring. The air was warmish, and as Charlotte rounded the corner she could smell the honeysuckle,…

During the winter of 1955, Chris took courses at Columbia. He came from Indianapolis; New York stunned him. Knowing nothing, he took a room in a railroad flat uptown near school: one room, 11 x 7, bed with a defeated mattress. It was cheap, and he could use the kitchen along with the three other…