Fiction

In September of 1965, when I was eighteen years old, I traveled from London, England, where I was living, to Hamburg, West Germany, with my friend Carl Jurgen Kurtz. Carl was twenty. We’d met at a boarding house in Chelsea I’d lived in for a few weeks after I’d first arrived in London, and where…

I decided that we were in the old firehouse after some kind of fire, undressing, and the feeling was the same old feeling, that is everyone wanted to get drunk, but we could not do that, so we undressed heavily and breathed heavily, each breath a full pint, and I sat on a stool beside…

In February, when the snow comes down hard, little globes of light are left along Route 23, not the side where the Arco station is, but on the other side, which slopes off when a driver least expects it. The lights are made out of paper bags and sand and candles, and they burn past…

They moved into Silver Glade with a brand new baby, unnamed, although the grandparents had it registered for high school as Clementine Wrentham Farmer. Wrentham was their name and Farmer was the name their daughter, Lina, used when writing the check for the house. Her professional name, to their joy, was still Lina Rose Wrentham….

Wyatt Ingalls and Esther Markham had separately been hired to bid at auction on Church Owl. They had never met. Their assigned seats were next to each other. The auctioneer, Reginald Avery, had just said, "—splendid Church Owl." From the auctioneer’s right, a tall woman of age twenty-two, with an aurora of dark red hair,…

It was through our friend Shirley that we met the Kalowski boys. I was eleven that summer, and my sister, Lila, was thirteen. Shirley used to live in the hollow down below us, but had recently moved up the road, where the houses were more populous, closer to the hard road and the still faraway…

I have never, but for that first night with Vivienne, vomited in the back of a taxi. Vivienne moved into what had been my brother Ethan’s room in my rent-controlled apartment in New York. I firmly believe rent-control laws prohibit gainfully employed art gallery assistants and copy editors and salesgirls at Banana Republic from living…

The cousins made a rough crossing, they’d have said, if they had thought to complain. They mentioned but didn’t lament the time in the air, the late arrival at De Gaulle, the bus ride to catch the train at the Gare Montparnasse, or the long wait for the Très Grand Vitesse to Bordeaux. They did…

One day I get tired of crying and feeling sorry for myself—I’m not starving, I’m not in a war, I’m not crippled—and decide to track down my real father’s phone number. Isn’t it about time? I’m practically thirty years old. This is my life, right now. I call Cleveland information. I don’t know why I’m…