Fiction

The following excerpts are from Archangel , a hybrid work that takes as its center the unnamed “monster” in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In Shelley’s book (so very different from the movies) the “monster” learns to read by overhearing cottagers giving lessons to a foreigner. Subsequently he reads many books-including Paradise Lost, Volney’s Ruins of Empire,…

The air outside was warm and wet, like breath. Feeling the breeze on his face, the baby stopped crying and looked up at the sky. I turned him around and leaned him against my chest, holding him with one hand curled under his arms, the other cupping his bottom. He gently kicked his legs, as…

  The men and women of the Causon Creek Church of God with Signs Following were expecting families from congregations all over the South to attend their annual homecoming services, some from hundreds of miles away. Most would cross the Tennessee border from North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky, though a few were coming from states…

A section of the newspaper, rolled into a tight cone and flaming at the top, stuck out of the cook’s ear the first time I saw him. This was early June, in Corpus Christi, Texas, when I was sixteen and had been hired as the delivery driver for La Cocina Mexican Restaurant. The cook was…

She was in her early twenties, five or six years younger than me. She moved with a catlike suppleness through our dull office space (scratchy fabric of cubicle walls, coiled wires, the kitchen with its empty Pepsi cans assembled into a shaky pyramid for future recycling). She wore skirts—nobody in our office wore skirts—short, flared…

Mandy stood in front of the open garage and asked her husband why anybody would ask her over for lunch on a Sunday. Dan was already moving the bicycles, hanging the rakes on a hook, stacking things she didn’t recognize. Maybe this woman wanted to get to know her, be her friend, he said, rolling…

It all started when Sophie came home from college, between her sophomore and junior years. She wasn’t happy to be back. She’d grown to love Boston, the sad blustery winters, the confusing one-ways and roundabouts, and she felt like she’d outgrown California—its sunny, childlike happiness. Worst of all was her mother. Sophie was an only…

Chicago Stories Alewives The year the alewives were washing up on the shores of the lake and their stench rose up from the beaches so that even when you couldn’t smell them anymore they stank up your memory. Newly dead they were a silvery blue. In the sun they were like hundreds of mirrors. They…

Mackey Conlon didn’t believe in God or science. She believed in patterns in the world you had to be sharp enough to catch. Feelings you had to be open enough to feel. She wasn’t one of those crunchy freaks; she just believed in the ability to see things for yourself. Who else was going to…