Fiction

“It’s a dying art, you know.” Leopold says this to me as I am chopping up the chicken for the lions. I just grunt. I don’t see anything artistic about chopping up one hundred and fifty pounds of dead birds for three giant cats that always look at me like they are wondering what I…

1. She angled the camera for what she called the money shot: two attic eyebrow windows and a nose-shaped balcony off the second-floor master. If we squinted from the driveway, we could make out the mouth, the Dutch breakfast door that cut you in half at the stomach. The face of evil, the mother said, laughing, rubbing…

The pilot was talking about the most recent sighting of the wild man in the park. A dentist and her daughter had glimpsed him while on a camping trip. This glimpse had been fleeting and, mercifully, at a distance. He’d apparently not been wearing any pants. “No pants,” I said. “That’s right,” said the pilot….

Alex’s alley was better lit than the street. When she’d moved to San Diego several years before, Alex had started going for walks in the twilight hours, when the sun was dipping behind the trees but before it got too dark. In Chicago, she’d preferred to walk at night, when people were home from work…

Bants and I sit with the terriermen at The Bird in Hand pub on the eve of the trail hunt. It is Bants who wants to speak to them, but he will soon find out that terriermen are bad news. We squeeze ourselves, locally brewed beer in hand, around the corner table. The invitation is…

Aidan was playing with rocks, playing with a boy and girl who had been in the water, unattended, when we arrived at the beach. The beach was otherwise deserted; no one had come for the brother and sister for the hour we had been there and so I kept an eye on all of them—my…

They called her Little though she wasn’t anymore. She resembled her father, red-haired and tall. As a kid she’d been the one who hauled with him when his sternman didn’t show. Lobstering was a franker education than what she got at school. If you weren’t in the present, it came and found you. A bloodied…

The Local History project was a partner situation, and Oren was not surprised when he got Imogene Fraser. She was Mr. Serwer’s trusted ambassador, and he, the new student, was treated like a lost diplomat who barely spoke the language. They pulled topics out of a tupperware. Imogene let him do it, and he picked…

The HerbariumMay 1942 The greenhouse shimmers like a glass cathedral. A cedar waxwing alights from a nearby Oregon grape licked by flames of fern. The bird sails to the tip of the greenhouse’s back A, a lemon-bellied wick on a giant’s sunlit candle. Some of its feathers are dipped in red as if to seal a…