Fiction

When I was young our winter-wear wouldn’t have permitted anyone to look sexy. The look then was like the inflated figures in a Macy’s parade, puffy and down-stuffed, colorful rubber boots, with pompons on the hats our mothers knitted, matching mittens hanging on yarn from our coat sleeves. Fashion then didn’t have in mind sprinting…

1 September There was nothing outside our town to warn you of its coming. One second you weren’t there and the next you were. It was more than a post office and more than a village, but it had no sprawl, it had no outskirts. The town huddled close together for protection, the desert everyone…

"At last," my husband said, when I had locked up for the night and come to bed. "You knew I would," I said. "But I didn’t know when." Propped up in the recently rented hospital bed, he peered more closely at my chosen book. A novel by Patrick O’Brian. "Wait, no, no," he said. "You…

I was in the kitchen when the FBI arrived. I had no idea who they were at first. Just two guys coming up the front walk. I felt the Watch Tower heading my way, I sensed conversion, vacuum cleaners, rubbery soap in small plastic buckets that could clean anything yet protect the surface. I threw…

I begin to see the possibilities in dehydration just about now. Dehydration-a tantalizing word. Fog without moisture, space without stars or solar magnificence. Somewhere hidden are heaps of stone our guide found last week and, in our group’s wandering about, lost again. An effluvium of dust has hung over us for two months now, almost…

When Pia walks into his flat in Bombay, she thinks it’s a joke. She looks up at Adil, the man she has agreed to marry, waiting for him to ask the rightful occupant of this miniature box to step out of his hiding place. "So what do you think?" he says, mistaking her smile for…

When his wife told him to get out of the house that had been hers, anyway, long before they were married, Valdek Moore looked in the paper and found a semi-furnished one-bedroom at Linden Pines. The development’s name suggested an estate of elegant foliage, right for a term of penance, when it was really a…

1. Topsy, needy This is about an elephant, electrocuted one hundred years ago. Her name was Topsy, and she was famous at a time when people were still amazed by an elephant. Plus she did tricks. She could stand on her back legs, raising her front legs, wearing a gauze tutu. She was a star…

Dear Laird Hunt, It was with great interest that I read the description of your novel and the accompanying biographical material that appeared this weekend in the monthly literary supplement to our otherwise dull and basically pretty crappy county paper. I was so intrigued, in fact, that no sooner had I finished reading it I…