Fiction

I exhausted the local dentists. They had nothing to say. Even the specialists in the city were silent. All I wanted was an explanation. – Why are my teeth falling out? – You've been working too hard. – I'm a healthy man! – Don't argue. Cut out the night life. That's when it started, hm?…

This is a bathroom/animal/castration story. Dianne and Drummond Hadley have a wildcat that was given to them by the guy that runs the Desert Museum in Tucson. It stands maybe two feet high and is really substantial if you're used to looking at housecats. It plays. If you pull a wad of paper on a…

Before it gets lost into the void I want to tell about a letter that got written to the Denver Post years ago. It could have been as long ago as 1947 or 1948. It was apparently written in answer to a letter that had been written earlier and, judging by this letter the earlier…

Drawings Winners to be announced The prisoner. He had been in long enough, accused for others gain, tried by a court of men who had forgotten how to live, and convicted in innocence by a jury who were hungry for delicacies. In prison he was taught to appear guilty so he wouldn't suffer the hatred…

A painter sat down at his table with a dusty canvas before him. On the other side of his studio, his easels stood like a forest. Each one represented a birthday or Christmas in which a relative had come up with the perfect gift. But because he was the type of artist that liked to…

Little Bertha Venation would have been the most exquisite young woman of her century, were it not for her distressing tendancy to cheat on her lovers with other men, for a yes, for a no, sometimes not even for a yes or a no. At the time this story begins, her lover was a splendid…

My father is in New York but I don't see him until the last day of his trip East. Business, he says, Business. Just the same though I look for him on every street corner, in all the bars along Lexington Avenue, and bent low, almost to my knees, I search the taxis along Fifth…

After three years, eleven months, and two days service, Corporal Fitzgerald re-enlisted for six years, collected a re-enlistment bonus and, that same afternoon, went to the bank in Oceanside and paid the balance of the note of his 1959 Chevrolet which was four years old. He had thought that would make him feel good, but…

So there he perched, a poor sad slob of a young failure, Marvin Gardens, Ph.D., pondering in the deadest center of his ambiguities. Two years past, to the day, he had assessed his life from that identical spot – the large stuffed chair in his small study (not yet, then, had greyish stuffing begun to…