Fiction

The sight of God in woman is the most perfect of all.—Ibn Arabi Violence is better than prayer. I know because I prayed for thirty years without consequence, then I beat up a beggar and knew God. I was going to pray even then, though that time I was neither leading the prayer nor giving…

When I returned from the front, I took the most direct route to the hotel room that Cora, the preacher’s daughter, had booked for us. No, that’s not one hundred percent true. The taxi stopped at the marble stairs leading up to the entrance of the hotel; the driver waited while I sorted through my…

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…

The morning after my husband’s vision of the end of the world, we picked up the show rabbits from Dubuque. An old college buddy was the only breeder in the tri-state area with the Dwarf Hotot. My son, Mason, had seen them in Rabbit Fancier and dreamed in spots and tiny bobbed ears for weeks. I couldn’t…

His rental bike was as big as mine, so I chose a more difficult path that wound into a deep valley a few miles from the campsite. The small, red guidebook said it was an advanced route. I insisted. Me, my wife, and my son. About an hour in, I became separated, hurt my foot….

And that was the year Sister Margaret became Meg. A decade after she left our village, after she renounced her membership with Mothers for Christ, she returned from the big city. Armed with a new name and a new age. “Life begins at forty” was the only thing she said when men asked her the…