Fiction

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…

Once there was a woman who was asked by a stranger to carry a foreign object with her onto a plane: When the stranger approached her, the woman was sitting at the edge of her chair a few feet from the gate out of which her plane was scheduled to leave. Her legs were crossed….

Mitchell’s daughter, who was twelve, accused him of loving his books but hating his customers. He didn’t hate them. He just didn’t like having to chat with them, or lead them to very clearly marked sections (if they couldn’t read signs, why were they buying books?) while they complained that nothing was arranged by title….

Olivia Alcuaz set down platters of spaghetti, tortillas, tomato and cucumber salad. She sat, lifted her chest as if she were in posture class, and launched into a tale about her cousin Enrique. Enrique had been driving down from Mexico when there were reports of a terrible crash involving a white car. Enrique’s car was…

  Marie parks in the circular drive where the front lawn had been grass the summer before. But nothing so beautiful, nothing so inherently good, about grass. The paving job was done by her cousin William’s own company, which he’d started after deciding it was too difficult to make a living as a fisherman. Hippie-ish…

Mason Salisbury and his son, Moreau, were hunting by Little Sandy Creek several miles from where the stream ran through town and powered the Salisbury mill. Father and son carried old fowling pieces and hadn’t brought the dogs; they weren’t hunting so much as talking. Moreau was home from seminary in Cazenovia. He hadn’t wanted…

Maybe the whole thing could be accounted for by the year, 1971: how we—well, I—woke at three in the morning with a funny sensation that something, somebody, was missing, and wandered out to the living room where my childhood sweetheart, the love-of-my-life Richie, was supposed to be sleeping on the couch. He was gone. He…