Fiction

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania is the softest state in the Union. Early in its history, when it was still a colony, Pennsylvania passed an ordinance outlawing sharp corners for the good of the citizenry. As a result, the artisans of Pennsylvania pioneered a style of furniture making that came to be known as Rustic Curvature for its…

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…

Looking Sometimes we still see it. Even now. Nights like this, sprawled on the deck of the mothership—stars rioting overhead, waves spanking the hull below—we close our eyes and there it looms, our Infinity, floating serenely across the insides of our lids like some pale winged creature borne of desire, luck, and dreams. Also a…

The notification came on a weekend, and Jake’s, in Iceland, had gotten through first. Sarah was in a desert, her cell phone wasn’t working well, and she had to go back to the base to find out what was wrong. She calls him from the landline, and he tells her as much as he knows….

Vito was lethargic, curled up in his fleece bed with sad eyes. He wasn’t eating. His distended abdomen was sore to the touch. Six times he’d eaten a sock. Five times it had come out the other side, worse for the wear, composted. But not this time. It was the sixth sock that did not…

Charlie Teitlebaum, a forty-two-year-old surgeon born and raised in the same Boston neighborhood in which Howard had grown up, had not been one of Howard’s residents, but while Charlie was doing his internship at The George Washington School of Medicine, where Howard was on the faculty, he and Howard became friends. At the time, Charlie…

On the radio, they were calling it “snow-mageddon.” Joan had seen it on the news, as well, in a Doppler radar swirl that looked like a green hurricane, pulsing like a sick heart over the Cascade Mountains. The worst of it was supposed to hit tomorrow, midday, but already the snow had begun to fall…

Because nights on the third shift seem to stretch longer than they should, and because sleeping through the day has been giving him nightmares, Jimmy Barnes buys coffee at the truck stop on Sugar Hill Road. He circles the place once before parking. In the big lot out back, the tractor-trailers are lined in rows,…