Fiction

She steps up and out and stands in her yard. Ice crackling the mud and hoarfrost burning off the tall grass left unscythed beneath the trees. She bends and puts a finger to the ice, bends farther over and sniffs at it. Now here come the crows. Cawing and settling on the ridge line of…

The beach house in Bodega Bay was supposed to be our escape, but it was just another place for us to be uncomfortable together. Every summer, we used to spend a couple weeks there. My father drove us in his coral car, a BMW sedan so glossy it was almost as if it wasn’t there;…

According to my diary, it was on May 29, 1998, that I received an invitation to the Séance Book Club. The letter from a Mrs. Lisette Visser read in part, “We would appreciate your being with us on eight consecutive evenings, during which we will summon the characters from your novel, The Museum Guard, and…

Truth lies within a little and certain compass.                 –Viscount Bolingbroke   It took my Aunt Toby twenty years to profit enough from fictohistoriographia to give up teaching, to release the two of us from New York, to realize her dream to buy a house on Lake Piscataqua in New England. But at last, the year…

File 2011/Electronic Copy of Revenant Composition, “The Ghost Writer,” in Word DOCX (Former Sex: Female; Deceased: circa 2011) The word ghost derives from the Anglo-Saxon gast, breath or spirit. So to “give up the ghost” is to die. At the same time, in being relinquished by the body, the ghost escapes the confines of mortality:…

He surprised himself by claiming his father’s old nickel-finish Colt revolver. There was no battle to be fought here—no one else wanted the thing; no one wanted any of the guns that now were lined up in the cabinet (they couldn’t sell them, a legal issue, something about permits, which everyone agreed, though annoying, sounded…

For four days I’d been sitting at a conference table with engineers from the different outfits that had been pulled together for this project, and across the table was a guy who I’d bonded with after I saved his hide on some controls issues and he saved mine on some line specs. Since then, we…

She wasn’t surprised to end up in his office, but she’d always thought it would be about her son, not her daughter. There was a lesson in it: Instead of worrying about the ones who didn’t fit in, you should worry about the ones who seemed to fit in too well. “It’s not uncommon,” he…

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening.                 —“The Secret Miracle,” by Jorge Luis Borges M woke up in a strange room with her name, Leeza, on his lips. A…