Fiction

There were only a few perfect spots in the world, and Leo Spivak had finally found one of them, right here in Mendocino. He was stretched out just inside the screen door of the brown-shingled beachfront cottage he and his wife, Rachel, had rented for a week-just the two of them, alone in all this…

A turquoise silk scarf, elegantly long, and narrow; so delicately threaded with pale gold and silver butterflies, you might lose yourself in a dream contemplating it, imagining you’re gazing into another dimension or another time in which the heraldic butterflies are living creatures with slow, pulsing wings. Eleven years old, I was searching for a…

She was dozing on a faded Navajo blanket with the filmy shade of a maple tree drawn like a veil across her skin. Her blouse was still opened to where he’d unbuttoned it down to the sky blue of the bra she’d brought back as a souvenir from Italy. Martin was lying just beyond the…

I won’t tell you my name. I don’t know who you are; maybe you’d pass my name on, and there are many whom I fear now. I would love it if I had nothing to tell you. I have lost nearly everything-country, family, name-but I have retained my honor and gained a story, to my…

High up, in the towers of the public housing project, Laura Providencia and her mother, her brother, Angel, and her little sister, Rosita, lived under siege. In the elevator that smelled like a urinal, the junkies bobbed devotionally. The walls of the long hallways teemed with the exploding alphabet, the declamations, white, screaming, “Paco of…

It was a simple choice, the way she figured, and I still think she was right. Either she went willingly, ignoring everything still unsettled, or she could refuse and risk guilt for the rest of her life. So there really was no choice. She made a reservation, bought a suitcase, and headed for the airport….

from Citizens Review Then there was the police chief’s daughter, always bad news. Like tonight-another roasting summer night, air conditioners not quite keeping up-she sat alone at the bar, tapping her chipped fingernails against a glass. She took a last drag on the cigarette the fag gave her, a lousy, tasteless, low-tar wimp of a…

She draws. She draws a door. On the windowpane in breath. Breathes on the glass and draws. A door, an O spells polio. Six years old. She dreams. Walks with her father again. River of glass. To the river of glass collecting bits of this and that to examine later under the microscope. To hold….

How many times since Elise’s death had her husband, Mitch, said numbly, Oh Christ, I can’t believe she’s gone, I don’t know what to do. And Joan replied helplessly, squeezing his hand, I know! I know. Of course, there wouldn’t be one-a wake. The deceased hadn’t been Catholic. Hadn’t been brought up in any church,…