Fiction

The Man with the Spotted Dog I was sitting at an outdoor café across from the ocean in Florida when I spotted the man with the spotted dog. I thought it was interesting. Me at a seaside resort and a man with a spotted dog. It reminded me of the famous story where a man…

Green is the color that defines them, of course. They don’t realize yet, but it’s already there in the picture. Look closely, and Susan’s wearing a grass-green peridot and pearl ring on her engagement finger, for Jim, who’s coming to meet her as the S.S. Carinthia steams into New York Harbor. And Keith has on…

We were crazy in love. Crazy. He wasn’t handsome. He was maybe even ugly. Abraham Lincoln ugly. With face bumps like Abe had. But he had angel radiance. He outdid the sun. His very glance polished you. He rubbed light into your skin as if light were lotion. I loved him. Nothing with this much…

“Come look at the nudes, Carla.” My uncle started heading towards his studio with his Chihuahua slung over his shoulder, the dog’s ass snug in his fat hand. I skipped behind him, happy, cracking spearmint gum. Uncle Samson breathed with a chronic stuffy nose and dragged the heels of his feet as he walked because…

Rodney shifted the heavy wooden console a few inches each night, hoping the hotel manager wouldn’t notice the newly revealed depression in the commercial-grade carpet. By the end of the week he could comfortably stand at the far left-hand side of the desk-actually a long laminated counter-and see the entire picture without distortion. He stood…

after Natalia Ginzburg “The following essay, ‘He and I,’ captures the seesaw of human companionship and love with a patience and sensitivity to interconnectedness that it is hard to imagine a male essayist attempting, much less equaling.” -Phillip Lopate She is quintessentially French. I am, in the loosest sense of the word, American. She always…

Beatrice needed a new liver. Her old one had succumbed to damage suffered in a fall one month earlier from the top of a seven-story parking garage. She lay in a coma while the hospital prepared for her imminent transplant, but she was not asleep. That part of her which was not her broken body…

When it becomes possible to sleep with his brother’s wife, George Norgaard jumps at the chance. He has in fact been wanting to sleep with her for years: he’s spied on her at picnics, at Christmas, and once years ago they kissed too long-but nothing like this. Now they meet in hotels, in bars, at…

i. Other People I begin with what I see plainly, before and around me. There is much to curtail. To one side, my neighbors are a family, extremely nuclear in a contemporary way. There’s a mother, a father, a girl, and a boy, both children from previous marriages, the girl blond, the boy brunette, both…