Fiction

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…

Let’s say the world comes to you from outside. Why not? What are you but malleable organic bodies, nothingness within variegated layers of hard and soft tissue pumped with H2O, birthed into the torment of the world? Your orifices—eyes, ears, nose, mouth, anus, genitals, skin—flutter open, and you are ready for business. Me, Kitty, too….

Just past midnight, when it looked like things might get out of hand, Greer brought out the baseball bat he kept under the bar and, holding it cocked, edged toward the tall red-haired punk with the bad mouth, and his two jerk friends. “Time to go home, boys,” he said. “You better think, man,” the…

The woman having a miscarriage bumps into the woman getting an abortion. It is New Year’s Eve. They are both in line at the pharmacy, buying ibuprofen. One carries a basket holding a bottle of wine, the other four candy bars. There are many people ahead of them. “Those look good,” says the first, glancing…

  It is a fine ring of white plaster and red bricks. I saw Juan Belmonte, bullfight idol, here once…when he came down to watch the bulls brought in. This night the fodder for tomorrow’s show was being brought in, too. Files of men, arms in the air. —Jay Allen, “Slaughter of 4,000 at Badajoz,…

Her family moved to town from Omaha on Christmas Eve. Her father and mother are the new managers of the Sherman Ice Arena, which, thanks to the coal-baron millionaire who owns it, is open all year. It is mid-January now, skating season. Half the town goes to the public skate on Saturday afternoon, the experience…

Rusty Bickers went walking through the fields at dusk, Rusty Bickers with a sadness and nobility that only Joseph could see. Joseph dreamed of Rusty Bickers at the kitchen table, eating Captain Crunch cereal before bedtime, his head low, lost in thought; Rusty Bickers, silent but awake beneath the blankets on his cot, his hands…