Fiction

Her kitchen is filled with the neighbors’ dishes—all well-meaning, pity-stained, uncleaned. She can’t quite think, so she shuffles about the house, marveling at the strangeness. Touching the bill pile, a bruised spot in the oak banister, his fleece jacket on a coat rack, the cannon-shaped back of a wedding gift mixer, the crumbling scone on…

I am sitting behind a desk, not my desk, maybe your desk, watching the clock. That woman who works in the next cubicle has her radio tuned to NPR. “All Things Considered” has come on. This is good, this means that we are getting toward the end of things. The work day, I mean. On…

The summer I first discovered how it feels to suffer in love, I worked for a local newspaper, selling subscriptions over the phone. It was a miserable job, and I was lousy at it. I stumbled through my script, apologizing too often, agreeing with people on the other end of the line that it was…

“Ma’am? You can’t open the windows, sorry.” Coolly she turned to the boy. Prissy Mexican kid, wearing white-boy wire-rim glasses, who’d brought up her single lightweight suitcase she’d have preferred to have brought herself, to save a tip. But at the hotel check-in downstairs the suave, brisk young woman behind the counter had finessed Kathryn,…

It was more than a year since the bombings, but the rates were still very good. The travel agent who handled his business trips had arranged it all in a matter of minutes, and Leo and his wife would step foot on the island less than seventy-two hours after the idea had first come to…

Marty called. He left a message. The only Marty I ever knew. Maybe he said his last name, but he didn’t need to. Forty years, so what? I was back there in a high school desk. Do they still have them, that funny s-shaped chair with the storage box below, a 2 x 2 or…

Now they were in the car, a half hour late, on the way to lunch with Tina. Mary drove. Mary had said she’d leave him if he lied to her about other women again, and now she was leaving. It had all come out this morning. He felt sick. She seemed calm, determined, cold. It…

Kenya, Africa. Africa! Nine thousand miles from Portland. My wayward son Tim walks toward me with four tall, dark-as-midnight women. He has seen me, I’m quite sure of it, but nothing about his gait changes. He arrives at the tent and doesn’t say a word, or make any motion toward me. The thirty or so…

Here in this little town in Pennsylvania where I spend half the week and the whole long summer, we are urged to buy local. This is a pleasure, not a duty or a difficulty. The rewards are multiple: sticking it to the multinationals, high quality merchandise, real personal exchanges. Becoming known. The place in town…