Fiction

Every day did not start with Vince awake that early, dressing in the dark, moving with whispery sounds down the stairs and through the kitchen, out into the autumn morning while ground-fog lay on the milkweed burst open and the stumps of harvested corn. But enough of them did. I went to the bedroom window…

The things it never does any good to protest. With our only son, Billy Frank, Jr., in a Mexican jail for having been intercepted with something illegal strapped to his leg. With daughter Mary Jo making daily visits to the shot-doctor for “vitamins,” leaving her probably autistic child in a playpen fitted with baubles and…

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…

In April when she drove away he looked at his hands. They were oily from the boat’s engine, from the garage. But what a thing to notice. He turned and saw the children, who were watching from the steps, and wondered what she had given him now. The day before she left they discovered something…

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…

There was such a strain on the silence between them after he'd eaten that it had to be broken. `Maybe we should never have given up the farm and come here. Even though we had no one to pass it on to,' Michael said, his head of coarse white hair leaning away from his wife…