Fiction

  Clare can’t walk. She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like…

In Spain I never rode the Talgo. The Talgo was the express train from Barcelona to Paris, but I never went to Barcelona. This was years before the Olympics, and Franco was finally dead. The white gorilla was still around and all the Gaudi, but I never made it there. Partly it was the expense….

  When do you begin traveling? When your airplane lifts off the ground? When you leave your house for the road? When you pack? When the plan first comes to mind? When you admit to how restless and ill at ease, even murderous, you feel at home? When you take your first steps? When you…

Or: The Story Behind the Failure of the 2003 Radio Salsa 98.1 Semi-Annual Cuban and/or Puerto Rican Heritage Festival The church is quiet except for the nun’s approaching footsteps. You could imagine the sound of the soft soles of her shoes scuffing down the center aisle, coming towards the last pew, barely growing louder as…

  Every village has its rhythm, and every year Templeton’s was the same. Summer meant tourists to the baseball museum, the crawl of traffic down Main Street, even a drunken soprano flinging an aria into the night on her stagger back to the Opera. With fall, the tourists thinned out, and the families of Phillies…

Hank says: "Pan Am is run by the CIA, you know." He says: "There’s trouble brewing here. Out there." He points with his chin. "In the sugar cane fields. In the jungle." He says: "Hemingway knows. He knows all about it." Clara says nothing. She is thinking that she can’t even get this one thing…

1. Georgetown, Great Exuma. Two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in the Chat and Chill Bar on Stocking Island. KB, the Bahamian who owns the place, is looking for an argument and can’t find one. Mandela versus Boutelayzee, University of Chicago versus Harvard, chanterelles versus portabellas. Even Mushroom John, who brought his wife, Sandy, down…

    For what did one raise these children? For what did one labor and heave and suffer reconstructive surgery; for what did one feed and clothe and coax and school, raising them from sitting to standing to making their own money, if not for their well-deserved gratitude? It was work, it was a lot…

  "Do be sure, dearie, that you get the plain yogurt for your father. I brought home vanilla by mistake last week, and he was ready to call out the constabulary." "Entendu," Eleanor called back, straightening her collar in front of the spotted mirror in the hall. How like her mother to use the phrase…