Fiction

In a deep socket of an empty acre lot in South Jersey, a wiry boy with dark eyebrows, burnished blond hair, and thick lenses in his glasses is clearing pathways through the milkweeds, trying to preserve as many of the leafy, muscular stalks as he can. He’s working harder than he’s worked in weeks, so…

There was no house yet, just a wellhead where the house would be, under an overturned box to keep the sand out. Clay was building the house, and it would be one to live in for a long time, so they were trying to get everything right. From the passenger seat, Susan watched him wedge…

1. I am my father’s sidekick, Mutt to his Jeff, Costello to Abbott, Tonto to the Lone Ranger. I am his pal, his fall guy. I follow him like a shadow. He calls me “Me Too.” Sure there’s a comic strip character named Me Too, but I am too young to know that. I fall…

Since they left Houston that summer, Hugh and his mother had traveled in a long, slow circuit as far north as Amarillo, then worked their way down through El Paso and San Antonio and Austin, seeing sights Hugh had no desire to see, and in which he doubted his mother had any real interest, either….

from Seven Mediterraneans The dreamer had heard what she thought was a rumor about someone she didn’t know wanting to have sex with her. This after several months of trying to have sex with Janine, who was in the painting group-they all took turns posing for gesture drawings-right before the weather changed to rain along…

The host is riding from Knocknarea And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare; Caoilte tossing his burning hair, And Niamh calling Away, come away: -“The Hosting of the Sidhe,” W. B. Yeats My mother spoke with the dead. After the doctors declared her cancer-free, she could feel and hear their ghosts, see them as clear as…

1. Savior The pustules on his back: volcanic almost in how they erupted, subsided, erupted. Closing my eyes, I would trace my fingertips along his skin, feeling the circular, hard shapes and slick, raised peaks. I wondered if they hurt when I touched him, how it felt to be so broken out, not only on…

According to city ordinance, the Buena Gente cantina should have been closed an hour ago. But the proprietress, a charitable soul whose life imitated the generosity of the earth, who believed in the rights of the people, and who didn’t mind defying a silly law in the name of good business, stayed open late because…

Last week my head was too small. This week, it is too big. My face in the mirror is a picture of dismay. If I try to correct the disproportion with baggy clothes, I will look not only moonheaded but squat, Charlie Brown-esque. When the head is too small, I fare no better: tight clothes…