Fiction

I’m driving my aunt Sarah’s Lexus, taking us to the meat place. We pass farms with pastures full of Holsteins and green trees. Weeds fill the ditches. Beyond, in the woods, are deer, raccoons, and skunks. Sometimes, driving on the road, I see them try to cross. Sometimes I see a carcass. I used to…

Before Edward stood and pointed his camera toward the table, Kelvyn hadn’t noticed the way that the glass top held the islands’ Bible-blue sky and the fat white puffs of cloud. That Edward noticed made her happy (she knew that the pictures he’d shot of her back in their adjoining cabins were of an entirely…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

After the winter of the coma when his wife sued for divorce, after the year of weekly grand mal seizures, Isaac had a job. Now he wanted his sons back—Ethan, who just turned five, and Paul, three and a half. The boys observed their father, if somewhat coolly, from photos posted on the wall behind…

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…

Leda would take the train. She hadn’t been on one in some time. A few days before, she read about a woman who killed herself on the track. She just lay there until it came. You never heard of that anymore—it seemed to have gone out of style. She didn’t think it was the best…