Fiction

I sought vengeance, and now I dream of forgiveness. Let me explain how that came about. I want to lay it all out. My friends, I hope this last journal of mine will reach you, so you can be with me, with my thoughts, as long as it takes you to read it, and I…

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…

Dad, Todd, Mal, and me are sitting in the positions I’ve assigned us, and the Mormon Tabernacle Boring is singing the National Anthem really slowly. After forever, we all put our Orioles caps back on as the Pirates take the field, and it’s showtime. My palms are sweating. Mom comes in. “Uh-oh,” I say, not…

In the days that summer when his mother had to work cleaning the cottages in Dáchenko and Kóslan, Anton was being watched by the Shurins. He was twelve and blind, and his mother feared leaving him alone. He spent his mornings working with Oleg Shurin in the tomato patches along the bluff, and in the…

Priscilla’s father comes to visit unannounced and buys her golf shoes, tight Guess? jeans, and a steak, medium rare. She pushes the pink plastic “medium rare” marker into the coin pocket of her jeans and forgets about it until the day after he dies, several months later, when she will find the thing on the…

translated by Jay Rubin Junko was watching television when the phone rang a few minutes before midnight. Keisuke sat in the corner of the room wearing headphones, eyes half-closed, head swinging back and forth as his long fingers flew over the strings of his electric guitar. He was practicing a fast passage and obviously had…

Late night in early winter. The last hour of the long drive home. I tend to the thermostat, keeping the car warm enough for my sleeping family, but not so warm that my focus turns dull. Beyond the chilled glass to my left, green dashboard lights angle up toward the stars. Distance defines our relations….

The time Anne left her husband, she went to France. She spent the first few days in Paris at an inexpensive hotel in the sixth arrondissement on rue Jacob. Her room was small and sparsely furnished; the bathroom, too, was small, the shower produced a tepid trickle. Instead of looking out onto the busy street,…

The Drowned Boy Our ghost was the soul of a standard five. One afternoon, nineteen years before, the boy drowned while swimming in the far dam, up near the ruined, roofless buildings of what people still called Old Goas. (We lived at New Goas, but nobody graced our place with that title anymore.) Back then,…