Fiction

Iris wants to walk on the beach with her feet in the ocean and the sun on her face. She wants to eat greasy hamburgers and drink pints of beer and throw peanut shells on the floor. She wants to wear high heels, polish the silver, dance the tango, bake a cake, plant peonies, daydream,…

This is a story about pretending. Imagine my father, a boy, not the old man who bought this shuttered house I have just cleaned out, here at the tropical tip of Florida, but a boy of six, seven, eight, in a one-room school with snow-bent eaves, with another black eye, another chipped tooth, pretending he’s…

“Is anything—not even happiness but just not torment—possible? No, nothing!” she answered herself now without the least hesitation. “…All efforts have been made; the screw is stripped.” —Anna in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina “She’s writing a book for children and doesn’t tell anybody about it, but she read it to me, and I gave the…

I was born in the Tuscan city of Siena, and among my earliest and fondest memories is having sat long ago on my father’s lap at a table outside the Piazza del Campo, with the Fountain of Gaia gurgling nearby, watching, wide-eyed, as Papa’s pencil turned blank paper into cartoon animals on my behalf. His…

A hornet’s nest hung above one of the French doors that led to the Quists’ back terrace. Harrison Quist first noticed it when he took out the garbage one Thursday morning in early June. He told his wife, Marcie, about it as he dressed for work, calling it a bee’s nest, and telling her to…

After Samuel died and I had to move up north to live with Faith and her husband Dan, I got rid of almost everything I owned. Not that I wanted to, but there was no space in their drafty house near the river for their things and my things too. I really only had a…

I always sat in the back of Mr. Kim’s algebra class. He was very enthusiastic about algebra. I drew a picture of me sticking my dick into Rex’s blond dreamgirl. Rex was on the other side of the room. I folded the paper and wrote Rex on the top, and told this ugly girl, Andrea…

The wolves came down from the hills and carried away the children of Chinook. The village lay wedged into a horseshoe beneath those white hills, twelve winding miles from Norton Sound. First one child was taken at the start of winter as he tugged his sled at the edge of a slope; another was snatched…

On a Friday, during his inspection of the sludge containment tank at the East Winder Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant, Calvin’s foot slipped off the catwalk—it was raining, the metal was wet—and his left work boot and left leg became submerged up to the knee in treated sewage. “Whoops,” said the plant manager beside him. The…