Fiction

A section of the newspaper, rolled into a tight cone and flaming at the top, stuck out of the cook’s ear the first time I saw him. This was early June, in Corpus Christi, Texas, when I was sixteen and had been hired as the delivery driver for La Cocina Mexican Restaurant. The cook was…

She was in her early twenties, five or six years younger than me. She moved with a catlike suppleness through our dull office space (scratchy fabric of cubicle walls, coiled wires, the kitchen with its empty Pepsi cans assembled into a shaky pyramid for future recycling). She wore skirts—nobody in our office wore skirts—short, flared…

Mandy stood in front of the open garage and asked her husband why anybody would ask her over for lunch on a Sunday. Dan was already moving the bicycles, hanging the rakes on a hook, stacking things she didn’t recognize. Maybe this woman wanted to get to know her, be her friend, he said, rolling…

It all started when Sophie came home from college, between her sophomore and junior years. She wasn’t happy to be back. She’d grown to love Boston, the sad blustery winters, the confusing one-ways and roundabouts, and she felt like she’d outgrown California—its sunny, childlike happiness. Worst of all was her mother. Sophie was an only…

Chicago Stories Alewives The year the alewives were washing up on the shores of the lake and their stench rose up from the beaches so that even when you couldn’t smell them anymore they stank up your memory. Newly dead they were a silvery blue. In the sun they were like hundreds of mirrors. They…

Mackey Conlon didn’t believe in God or science. She believed in patterns in the world you had to be sharp enough to catch. Feelings you had to be open enough to feel. She wasn’t one of those crunchy freaks; she just believed in the ability to see things for yourself. Who else was going to…

  The soldiers keep Margaret in view. She carries her tripod, unsteadily, and an extra poncho for a bib. That they have let her come this far might be due to the weather, or possibly the kinds of amusements of which she remains unaware. Still, assume that they watch, tracking her as she stomps along…

  a novel excerpt She lost me as the nation was losing Richard Nixon, good riddance, whose head bobbled on his neck like a newborn’s, as mine would have, but whose five o’clock shadow was like the truth coming out. A loss to no one but himself.       She sought for me early in the Ford…

Out on the front lawn, Melinda was weeding her father’s garden with a birdlike metal claw when a car drifted up to the curb. A man with brown hair highlighted with blond streaks got out on the driver’s side. He stood still for a moment, staring at the house as if he owned it and…