Fiction

The wind blew with such direct force that the porch swing rode up sideways and wrenched back, overshooting its normal setting several times a minute, and my great-aunt Stacy was worried. She waited for a pause and then rushed to unhook it. The swing fell, and the chain smacked her ankle in its horrible funny-bone…

Today: This man is serious. He has put a map of the Mall in my hands and is now insisting that after meeting with the media at the Washington Monument, the parade/demonstration must be routed to the White House for a final statement. “You’re crazy,” I shout above the other voices, a strategy I learned…

Rain slipped unharmed across the last finger of the Florida fire. She waited a moment, face flushed with heat, sweat streaking across her charcoal face, eye whites bright with adrenaline as she made sure that Wylie and I had escaped the tinderbox pine forest. Wylie’s thick braid hung heavy halfway down his back. He faced…

In late afternoon I sit on the porch, which is mostly rotted to the ground. The screen door’s got cardboard laid in and the rock chimney leaks mortar like a pastry filling. The roof is more sky than shingle. At sixteen years old I wanted to be far away, and by seventeen I was long…

Most said the scout had discovered Rosa Dean buying toilet paper at the Super Thrifty. Some said she’d been at the Lucky Mart, while others said she’d been eating fried clams with her friends at McManahan’s Fish Fry. Of course the people of Apple Island, Massachusetts, had known about Rosa Dean’s beauty for years. They’d…

1st Johanna just wants to fuck baseball players. Baseball. She harbors no lust for the thunder boys of basketball. “Freaks of nature, glandular giants, scary,” she explains. “It’d be awful, like having sex with a kayak.” Football players don’t arouse her either. “God, no! Sadistic ogres. They should be out tolling cathedral bells or guarding…

Carleyville left late because of the rain. That morning the phone had finally been disconnected, after a ridiculous argument with the phone company, when the supervisor he was finally connected with agreed to disconnect after asking a series of questions he could not possibly answer. With his credit card, his “code” was his mother’s maiden…

Lily Stark’s mother had just said the facts of the murder were too horrible to repeat. But Lily’s father insisted a story as awful as how Mr. Sam was slaughtered would teach Lily something about this world. “I don’t care about the world you even mean,” Lily said. For a long time Lily had been…

On the evening of D-day, the pub is packed. It’s a close June night in the Welsh hills, with the threat of thunder. The radios of the village cough with static. The Quarryman’s Arms, with the tallest aerial for miles around, is a scrum of bodies, all waiting to hear the Prime Minister’s broadcast. There’s…