Fiction

Sublimation

Every evening after the network news, Dolly and her son watch “Jeopardy!” The habit dates back thirty years, to Bruce’s moody adolescence. Naturally shy, he was prone even then to sudden, awkward displays of confidence. “Jeopardy!” let him show off his worldly knowledge, which for a boy who’d seldom left the state of Maryland—who wouldn’t…

A Christmas Letter

I was in Florence, Italy, when my father died. It was Easter Sunday and I was staying with old friends, the Marchettis, in their apartment near Piazza delle Cure, a quiet neighborhood on the north edge of town that you entered from via Faentina. We hadn’t gone into the center for the big Easter celebration,…

Hungry

The grandmother was a bright, cellophane-wrapped hard candy of a person: sweet, but not necessarily what a child wanted. She knew it too. That sad bicentennial summer, her son in the hospital recovering from surgery, she and her granddaughter looked for comfort all over Des Moines: at the country club, the dinner club, the miniature-golf…

Go-Between

The dogs were all shapes and sizes, all colors. Black and white, brown and gray, they sniffed each other, growled, ran here and there, their paths crisscrossing. Alex and Naomi sat on a bench, their backs against the picnic table; she kept turning away from the river, away from the bridge and the cars sliding…

Arlene in Five

1.   When the brindled cow was five, she got an infected eye. Arlene took her to the vet in Armstead to have the eye examined, perhaps removed. The brindled cow wasn’t worth the vet bill, but she was a pet of sorts. Arlene loaded the cow into the horse trailer, delivered her to the…

Pretty

If Trudy had scooped the keys from Karl’s hand, if she had trilled, “How about I drive this time,” or if she had snapped, “You’ve got no business behind the wheel, you should know that by now,” they would have been stopped at that light, Trudy fiddling with the vents as the mist crept up…

Embarazada

When 600 milligrams of mifepristone is introduced into the bloodstream, it binds to progesterone receptors without activating the receptors, acting as an antiprogestin. Progesterone is fundamentally important for sustaining an early pregnancy. Try again—in English. When mifepristone is introduced into the bloodstream of a pregnant woman, it cuts off the supply of progesterone to the…

By Morning, New Mercies

Ellis Howard was sitting on the back porch, oiling the barrel of an old flintlock rifle that he had propped across his knees, when the neighbor girl appeared before him, scabby and slouching, pulling at the hem of a yellow cotton dress, and asked him if he had seen her dog that had run off…

La Desaparecida

This time the bombs came in the middle of Sunday mass. Leila heard the planes first, screaming from above. Then the first blast shook the entire church, pulled the walls and wooden pews and windows and ceramic-tiled roof off the building and turned them into a rain of fire and ash. Leila didn’t have time…