Fiction

It is an early autumn Sunday evening. Still warm and Michael has not made love to me since August. Each night he sleeps as he sleeps tonight, facing the window with his knees drawn up away from me. This lack of attention is not, he says, because he doesn't want me; it is, he says,…

She sat on the ledge of the sun porch reminiscing about O. In three minutes the sun would slide into the sea at the beach a few miles away. When you've seen sunsets, as he had, from the southern tips of continents and the lips of volcanic lakes, where would the patience come from to…

On a May morning when the sunlight fell thru the window of her Cambridge walk-up and lay like an extra blanket on the narrow daybed, Natalie Imray awakened from a nightmare. She lay quite still and cautiously, slowly, began to reconstruct the content of the dream behind her eyes, her mind reflecting it into words….

If it were possible, I'd lead you out of this room to another room or similar moment. Above a quiet meal, beside a candle, I'd have you repeat what you were saying which I was trying hard to hear. Your idea was so beautifully put it took my breath away. But Polly wouldn't let you…

"Talent," Robert Blaine said in his slow, invalid's voice, "is simply a matter of knowing how to handle yourself." He relaxed on his pillow; eyes gleaming, and shifted his skinny legs under the sheet. "That answer your question?" "Well, now, wait a minute, Bob," Jones said. His wheelchair was drawn up respectfully beside the bed…

Houses. She has a gift for houses, she sees what they might be, and beneath her tanned and capable hands, they become what they might be, their possibilities are realized. When she house-hunts, which she has done too often to suit her, she stalks the right house, want ads circled, realtors in tow like native…

The Puritan, like a memento mori grinning from a mirror, is still among us. Relentlessly, he reminds himself and us of our longings to shatter his image with the possibility of rebirth, of conversion, of utter transformation. But now, after tens of generations of staring stubbornly into himself, as if into the white night of…

In his lifetime Virgil became familiar as anyone with the history of dreams, saw in his palms an old man dreaming as he held them before his face and died. As he became one of the aged dead who sing in our sleep. "There was a man one time," Abigail would say, when Virgil was…

I The ghost of Raymondo Cruz leaned awkwardly against a far corner of the angled bedroom; by now Victor recognized that the mere slump of shoulders, the bending of wrinkled green slacks and a downcast skinny face signified nothing tragic; odds were high that Popps was only meditating, for no tears slid around; Victor, the…