Fiction

  • Apples

    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…

  • Treasure

    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…

  • from Burning Summer

    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…

  • Downstream

    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…

  • The Half-Wall

    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…

  • Banner Creek Summit

    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…

  • Post Production

    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:…