Fiction

He managed the walk to Main Street, three blocks, two long avenues, and didn’t worry about how he looked—a big whitehead poking along the sidewalk. Things were getting better, not that Tiny knew the absolute right moment to leave his house, because out the back door his garden merged with theirs, and the neighbors might…

From The Other Side of the World By the time I arrived home, my father’s tag sale had taken place, and Seana, who bought the works, had moved in with him. A good deal for them both, she claimed. She got all his leftovers—and he got her. Here’s the ad my father put in the…

Lyle was diabetic and the doctors had already lopped off two of his toes. He moved sometimes unsteadily, but he was a strong man with big hands and most people paid attention to his wide chest and knotty arms. He owned a big smile and rubbed his hands together when he was happy and this…

1846 My sisters loved my father and always came to his defense. They said he was brilliant and that much was true. He was generous with his family when it came to material goods, and my sisters never went without, at least until he lost everything we had. He was a notable man named John…

They had started out too late. This is what she tells herself as she sits in the dark on the old screened porch and drinks a glass of wine. Terrible wine—white, at least a week old, at room temperature. It had been sitting, recorked, in the box of last-minute things they’d brought up with them…

Year after year, rain enters your diary, as the Japanese say, and an exhaustive sadness prevails. And then suddenly one day, you find the love of your life. Happenstance or blind luck; what does it matter, as long as two people meet and life is lived more intensely for all that. Because nothing brings such…

His parents placed him on a Greyhound with twenty dollars, a plastic bag full of asparagus from the small garden out back, a satchel containing his meager summer clothes, and a letter. The asparagus he tossed in a trashcan when the bus made its first stop in Pennsylvania. The letter he opened before they’d even…

His parents placed him on a Greyhound with twenty dollars, a plastic bag full of asparagus from the small garden out back, a satchel containing his meager summer clothes, and a letter. The asparagus he tossed in a trashcan when the bus made its first stop in Pennsylvania. The letter he opened before they’d even…

After two years in Europe, fighting in the war, Frederick returned to the family farm outside of Ipswich. It was June of 1945. People commented on how much he’d changed. His eyes, which had once been full of feeling, were now entirely empty of emotion. Looking into them was like staring at a desert or…