Fiction

"You shouldn’t play with fire." Lena leans over Ivan’s shoulder and blows out the votive candle over which he is passing his index finger back and forth. She jiggles her arm nervously, and the silver bracelet slides beneath her sleeve. She looks around her. Everywhere there is plenty. The people are fat. How can some…

Lucy calls Greg up as soon as she gets to her office. She was the one who had to run, as soon as the teacher conference was over, who took off out of there like a bat out of hell, heading for her car, leaving Greg to walk more leisurely home, no doubt stopping on…

We have a grandfather somewhere. We don’t know where—I mean, we kiddos don’t. Not anymore. Mostly we remember him at the low house by the lake. Grousing at the black flies, stinking up Nature with the smell of his burning charcoal-and-plum pipe tobacco. A stout figure, like an orator in some senate, he liked to…

“Quick weddings and short marriages are all I know,” I admitted in my interview at June’s Brides, “but I love lace, and I’m capable of telling white lies to brides’ mothers. I was a psych minor, so I know everything is harder than it looks.” I got the job. And for the next few years,…

Jackie Flynn just turned eleven, but he has already spent plenty of time inside the Knickerbocker, a dark smoky barroom where men with rulers in their back pockets drink beer and stare at a soundless TV. Whenever his father goes out to do what he calls "moonlighting," Jackie’s mother insists that Jackie accompany him. She…

Before they had ever lived in the house, somebody’s useless cow had sickened and died in the shed next door. The shaggy rope that tethered her still lay in a corner, so when Sonia figured out that her older sister, Goldie, was having to do with a boy, she got up in the night, disentangled…

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…

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…