Fiction

I was on the bus, on my way to see Dad, trying to distract myself by looking at all the cruddy people and their misery, but it was a total no go, I couldn’t concentrate; and then I was standing there in front of him saying (just like I’d rehearsed), I’m really sorry to interrupt…

Anthony Baron steps outside and takes a deep breath. The air is fresh with the scent of loamy soil and budding trees. The snow, except for a few icy patches, has melted. At last it is spring. It was a long, hard winter. For months it seemed as if all he did was dig out…

The tribute was held downtown, far away from the theater district. Christine crossed the street gingerly, on four-inch heels thin as pencils—Ivan had always loved women in high heels—and checked the address against the invitation in her purse. The building was new and modern, the front window lettered with Cyrillic characters and a boldface translation:…

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…