Fiction

Rachel was the one who delivered the message. In the middle of dinner, she remembered the phone call, stood up, tossed her braid over her shoulder, and dug in her pocket for a scrap of paper. "Mom," then she looked warily at her father, "Dad, the prison called again today." She squinted at her eight-year-old…

Kaufman drove from one fire to another. In Baltimore, there had been a train wreck in the Howard Street tunnel, the northern end of which was not far from the small house he owned, tucked away on a side street behind the hulking wreck of a Victorian hotel, and three doors down from a gay…

He had jumped a radio tower and a cliff in Norway, but never a bridge. He chose a Wednesday morning when the fog was expected to burn off early and called in sick to work. At dawn, he climbed the tower. The riskiest part, he thought, would be landing in the water, where his friends…

The crusade had been brewed up over empty stomachs and ulcer bomb margaritas made from reconstituted lime juice and ice cubes older than the tequila. Bob’s tequila-idea plan was simple: He—we—would become minor anecdotes by driving to El Paso, Texas, finding Cormac McCarthy at the pool table, challenging him to a game of eight-ball, beating…

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…

In what turned out to be the last year of his life, my father slowly lost touch with the real world. There were persistent but not unpleasant hallucinations, such as seeing red birds in an empty sky, or hearing a nonexistent ringing telephone, so that in the middle of a silent stretch he’d suddenly look…

The rain is making this rented tuxedo smell like a wet animal. My sister Rachel and my ex-girlfriend Maggie are standing outside the car while drops fall lightly on their newly done hair and their pink satin bridesmaids dresses. They’re looking at me like I should be unlocking the car, not staring at it from…

They lived in Tennessee for five months. George had wanted to move there to play guitar, an idea he seized on late one night, in the hopeful, dreamy fog of too much youth and too many beers. When promise is like a drug, the stars are supernatural, water is glass. There, in the bedroom, he…