Fiction

Out back of the motel, a man and a boy feed alligators in the dark. I can see them past the curtains. Past the paisley curtains and through the cracked and dirty pane of glass, I see them, like shadows, see them and the slow, casting motions they make. I see things leave their hands,…

Alan Zimmer had been staying at the Kirschbergs’ for a week when he saw their daughter in the elevator at Brigham and Women’s. She was in a wheelchair. Alan, behind her, recognized the yellow kinks of her hair, and the dark roots that cleaved to her part. He stepped forward. “Jenna! What are you doing…

Because he could not afford to bury her, Wilson was still living with his mother. On the whole, though, his luck was holding. It was winter. The power company had shut off the electricity, removing any temptation he might have had to turn on the heat. He slept, or tried to sleep, in the corduroy…

“What’s wrong with Vanderbilt? Not that she’d get in necessarily,” Mrs. Holtzmann said to no one in particular. “There are plenty of good schools in the South.” She stood in the doorway of her classroom with her arms crossed. “Heil Holtzmann,” Audrey said under her breath. It was Monday. She was kneeling at her locker…

Now and again I get a whiff of something, the uneasy stillness before a hard and fast rain, and I can almost remember before, when I first moved in and the world was not yet fixed concretely beyond the edges of my skin. Poverty was novel then, even briefly thrilling and romantic, and it was…

Roy and Jimmy Boyle were shooting pool on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Lucky’s El Paso when Mooney Yost, a Lucky’s regular, came in and sat down on a bench near the boys’ table. Yost was about fifty years old, a fin and a sawbuck hustler who was always kind to Roy and his friends….

In the days before the wedding, as caterers and florists and seamstresses and bakers and even sommeliers and fromagers and charcutiers made appearances at the Maison ClosDennis, there were two of us who were irrelevant to the preparation of the proceedings. One of them, and this anyone could have predicted, was me, the boyfriend of…

It’s been a month now she’s been tutoring a dead girl on Park Avenue. She says as much into her cell. She’s walking fast to the subway so she won’t be late—she has to take three trains. “We’re doing vocab. Great Expectations.” “What’s that?” her mom says. “A blond girl? Does her hair color matter?”…

Even in this broken country, the women wanted to go shopping. The men arranged to have a guide from the hotel take their wives into town. The men were used to indulging the wives; the wives were used to being indulged; everyone was used to everyone else’s behaving in agreement with generally held, old-country expectations….