Fiction

i. In the year that Johann Pike turned seventy he had been the Executive Director of the Chicago Antiquarian Society for over thirty years. His offices were housed, along with the rest of the Society, in Blackthorne Hall, which was located six blocks from the center of the University of Chicago, where Johann’s father had…

“All this,” said Wayne the plumber, “was written down in the Bible five thousand years ago.” He was out on the deck taking a break from doing angioplasty on the pipes beneath my kitchen sink. Meanwhile, he was giving his assistant, John Pickles, a lesson. “Hey, Wayne,” I yelled from an upstairs window, “you’re wrong…

At two o’clock in the morning, no one is to blame. We’d been watching CNN, one scene of disaster leading to the next, the reporter in front of what might have been a new anthrax outbreak giving way to the military analyst in the studio with new developments in Kabul, when William put his hand…

My whole life, it always made me crazy when people weren’t sensible. Dancers, for instance, have the worst eating habits. I can’t begin to say how many anorexic little girls I used to have to hold up onstage, afraid they were going to faint on me any minute. I myself was lean and tight and…

This was just before my thirtieth birthday. I was in graduate school, of all places. I had no idea why. None of us did. We were extremely well-spoken rubber duckies. You could push us in any one direction, and we would flounder on forever. Sometimes, in the drowsy winter hallways, my conscience would rear up…

That’s how it starts, with the trash. Someone is swapping the trash, silently and insidiously, all over town. On the Promenade des Aubes, the rich lift the lids of their silvery pails and find used Pampers stuffed into empty boxes of Hamburger Helper; well-bred aunts hold up low-watt bulbs and shake them gingerly, as if…

The week Junior died, the temperature dropped to fourteen below and stayed there. The seats on my Honda felt like they were made of plywood, and the engine groaned before turning over, a low sound like some Japanese movie monster waking up after a thousand-year sleep. I had long underwear on under my suit, but…

It’s hard to stop looking for something without simultaneously giving up hope. I don’t know how. Buddhists learn the art of nonattachment, or they say they do. But have you ever seen a Buddhist lose his car keys? I have, and they’re just like the rest of us. Now that I was in my thirties,…

On that night, years back, we were up until the cardinals started calling. The first one lit out through the leaves before the air went from warm to hot. I remember that the call sounded lonely in the quiet of early morning. But soon, just before it got light, many of them were fussing in…