Fiction

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…

I remembered that morning because I woke up to such dark. It was my mother who woke me, came into my room, and said I could help earn a little extra money now. She got me a job with her out at the hog farm. She was dressed in comfortable clothes, soft jogging clothes, and…

They flew her in from Sweden, and by God, she looked it. Youthful. Leggy. Blond. Eyes like polished stones and features sharp as an army knife. She’d volunteered. And for what? At first I didn’t know. I’d never been to the Galápagos. Hell, never been farther south than Tijuana. Livy and I had stumbled across…

I arrived on Lopez Island in late October. Earlier that year, my mother had died, and on the ferry crossing from Seattle, I found myself thinking of her. Alive, she had been like adverbs or the color blue, impossible to ignore. I’d hoped that in a new setting she might be less present. Instead, pieces…

Unpacking my suitcase, I realized, annoyed, that one of my green socks had been left behind at the beach. At the time, it must have fallen behind the pousada wardrobe,but by now, who knows if it hadn’t become a floor rag,a bag for screws, a flannel scrapto polish furniture? If it had been a jacket,…

“Today we would have been married twenty-five years,” he said, looking at me through the rearview mirror. I didn’t react: I had jumped into a taxi on Nove de Julho Avenue. The traffic was terrible; we spent half an hour traveling to Faria Lima, and arrived at Pinheiros Street, all in the most aseptic silence….