Fiction

Gina had all the symptoms: sleep disturbances, hot flashes, irritability, weight gain, loss of libido, aching joints, and heart palpitations. The one she complained of most was hot flashes, which she dealt with by throwing off her clothes and cursing. As far as Evan was concerned, her irritability was the worst symptom; she was increasingly…

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…

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….

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…

On his way home from the Holland Park Underground Station, James Briggs had a curious sense of event in the windless, autumn evening. The house in which he lived with his wife and their one-and-a-half-year-old son was in a square, and in the garden of the square a fire was burning, the high, cracking flames…

I met my best pal, Phil, about ten years ago through our mutual wife. I was a young actor on the rise then, a couple of years out of Julliard, I’d done two seasons of Biloxi Blues (Broadway and a touring company) and although I was raised as a nice Jewish boy, I kept getting…

They’re free to run anywhere they like whenever they like, so they do. The land falls away from their small house on the hill along a prickly path; there’s a dirt road, a pasture where the steer are kept, swamps, a gully, groves of fruit trees, and then the creek from whose far bank a…