Fiction

  • John, for Christmas

    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…

  • Joyriders

    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,…

  • Cremains

    Her kitchen is filled with the neighbors’ dishes—all well-meaning, pity-stained, uncleaned. She can’t quite think, so she shuffles about the house, marveling at the strangeness. Touching the bill pile, a bruised spot in the oak banister, his fleece jacket on a coat rack, the cannon-shaped back of a wedding gift mixer, the crumbling scone on…

  • A Memo from Your Temp

    I am sitting behind a desk, not my desk, maybe your desk, watching the clock. That woman who works in the next cubicle has her radio tuned to NPR. “All Things Considered” has come on. This is good, this means that we are getting toward the end of things. The work day, I mean. On…

  • Distance

    “Ma’am? You can’t open the windows, sorry.” Coolly she turned to the boy. Prissy Mexican kid, wearing white-boy wire-rim glasses, who’d brought up her single lightweight suitcase she’d have preferred to have brought herself, to save a tip. But at the hotel check-in downstairs the suave, brisk young woman behind the counter had finessed Kathryn,…

  • The Sailor

    It was more than a year since the bombings, but the rates were still very good. The travel agent who handled his business trips had arranged it all in a matter of minutes, and Leo and his wife would step foot on the island less than seventy-two hours after the idea had first come to…

  • Marty

    Marty called. He left a message. The only Marty I ever knew. Maybe he said his last name, but he didn’t need to. Forty years, so what? I was back there in a high school desk. Do they still have them, that funny s-shaped chair with the storage box below, a 2 x 2 or…