Fiction

Uncle Lake and Aunt Bobette lived just off the La Loma bridge that crossed the Arroyo Seco. Right after the bridge, you made your first left-their house was classic Pasadena, a craftsman house with a low-pitched roof, exposed rafters, dark wood shingles, and a sleeping porch vined with wisteria and grape, drab green and idle…

Kai opened her eyes and looked around her. She was disoriented until she saw the Canadian customs booth in front, with the maple leaf decal on one of the glass panes. She realized she had fallen asleep, missing both the customs booth on the U.S. side and the Ambassador Bridge. Now she and Bailey were…

By the third occasion-she couldn’t exactly call them “dates”-Mira thought she had him figured out. Before that she had not been able to determine whether he was a crazy person acting sane or a sane person acting crazy. She had met him through the personals. His ad had described him as “energetic” and “ambitious,” and…

I am a good confidante, and I’ll tell you the secret: never offer advice, merely listen. You may repeat, ratify, sympathize, query, even divulge a tidbit or two, whip up the objective correlative, but you must never give an opinion about what your friend should do next. Never, never, never. The summer of my separation…

Why was it, Janice thought, that everything took longer than you wanted? Like life. It was the last day of summer, their last day together, and all the way upstate her mother went on about Cornell-the boys she dated, the friends she made-going “oh,” and “oh!” over the radio until Janice’s head went completely blank,…

I liked Gretchen better when she wasn’t trying to kill me. Here’s what she used: a Colt .38; a heavy-handled hatchet; a pair of powder-blue knitting needles (one in each ear, a quick thrust, and I’d be gonzo, Gretchen said); and a gleaming silver-tipped syringe, its cylinder filled with something thick and yellow. This was…

Murphy calls, says he wants to meet me down at the Chagrin River after work. “Fish and talk,” he says. I can hear machines in the background, people shouting. “When’s after work?” “Punching the clock now,” he says. “And?” “And I have a favor to ask.” I hang up, give the radio ten minutes to…

Marcia’s parents, who still lived in New Jersey, were truly happy when she came to live in the East again. Her father said, “Hey! That’s more like it,” when she first told them she was moving to New York. “About time!” her mother said. Nobody mentioned the years when they had been so bitterly against…

Many people in New York City stay up all night. I am one of them. I don’t know who the other ones are. Except for Walter, and Walter says things like, “I think my fingerprints are wearing off.” Things like that, things other people don’t think about. At two a.m., my phone rings. “Get lost,”…