Fiction

On a glorious, gilded Levantine morning, the day after the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, we heard the flapping of Auntie Lulu’s strapless sandals climbing up the two flights of stairs to our landing. Glee and smile wrinkles overwhelmed my mother’s face. She looked invigorated, as if she’d been dunked in an Italian fountain…

It was Whitney Putnam’s first time inside the Boise Airport. He stood in the baggage claim watching two suitcases and a car seat rotate on the carousel. The plane arriving from Denver landed twenty minutes ago, and the passengers have come and gone already. He searched the faces of women descending the escalator at the…

Albert Arno, the film director, dropped dead at his home in the middle of a sentence. It was early evening and his wife, Lynne, was lifting a dish of potato gratin out of the oven. Albert came out of the downstairs shower room, one striped towel wrapped round his waist, rubbing his neck with another:…

Once, when she’d been walking in her neighborhood, a car had stopped for directions to Alsop, the psychiatric hospital perched above the Blackstone River. How to get there was complicated, the man already so lost in the tangle of leafy streets that Tess hadn’t been sure where to start. Begin at the beginning, wasn’t that…

It was 1968 and there was a war between the men and the women. Jane heard it on the radio, where for the first time women’s voices read the news; and she saw it at school, where her art teacher, Miss Hannah Shapiro, had started going braless—great wandering breasts shifting this way and that under…

No one knows where it came from. Some say a long black car pulled up to the gas station and from it stepped a black-haired, black-eyed man in a black suit, who coughed once into his fist and then gripped the pump and muddied it with his phlegm. Others say that late one night—for a…

When I met her, I had the kind of job people always think they want until they try it for a few weeks. I was working as a production supervisor for a studio that made a lot of profitable, mediocre movies, and one of my responsibilities was to find locations where other movie people would…

By midnight, Josif had downed five shots of whiskey, flirted with three girls the wrong side of half his age, and sprawled into a table, clattering aside glasses and bottles. It was my fault. I’d brought him. He was a contract worker from Croatia, and, despite monthly sojourns in the States, he had no friends….

The smell of scattered mothballs as the cottage doors rattled open year after faithful year. There was the sweet rot of paperbacks stretching their spines. Here, men and boys didn’t wear socks with their trousers, and the women talked in whispers scrutinizing newcomers over gin and tonics, straightening their stiff cotton skirts with a propriety…