Fiction

Madeline Voltaire (1946–present)   She was an only child, adored by her mother and father, but she was lonely and she vowed, when she married, to have as many children as her body would allow. Madeline had long black hair, so long she could sit on it or wear it piled in thick curls atop…

It’s only six months, the social worker told Mauro. Then you’ll have your daughter home. She said there were far worse places they could send a girl convicted of such a crime. She described the compound as being like a summer camp, a small boarding school in the campo, a retreat even if operated by…

When I finally returned to Southern California, I expected to find the locals in the grips of apocalyptic fear, arming themselves and venturing out from fortified homes only for the most necessary provisions. The area had recently suffered a brutal terrorist attack, during which over a dozen people were gunned down while attending a retirement…

Some of you walked as though you were walking on coals of fire. Some of you as though in the field of arboles you remembered from when you were younger, when your fathers taught you how to pull the chilis from the stem, though there were no stems and you were on lookout for other…

Tongues started wagging after Nazan Abla, our next-door neighbor’s daughter, was hospitalized for a week. I heard her mother tell my mother through the kitchen window that she had a bleeding ulcer. But the real gossip started after her hospital stay. In the year that followed, she broke up with her fiancé, took a job…

Excerpt from Fellowship Point   Dick thought he’d drive to the prison himself. His wife, Polly, couldn’t do it. Doctor’s orders. She wasn’t to drive until the cast came off. Annoying. Exasperating! He had to wait until he could slip away. If she caught him, she’d keep him from going. In the meantime, he watched…

I say, to the children, in their tinted goggles and their helmets and their puffy jackets and pants and their tiny boots locked into their tiny skis, I say to them, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we got him.” The children look at me, look at each other, look back at me. They are five years old….

He was fed up with the little brat and just wanted to be by himself for a while. He wanted to ask his wife if she minded if he took a walk alone, met up with them in a few hours, but he knew she would be hurt. “How many times have you been here?”…

Their last morning of vacation, he’d poured so much champagne at brunch—Chandon, with little gold stars gushing across the label—that her tongue had loosened. “Strangely enough, it was about my ex,” she’d said. “I mean, strange that I’d dream it now.” They’d taken a cabin in the woods for the Thanksgiving holiday. Her grown son…