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…

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…

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…

Jane and Evan moved to a small city in eastern Ohio and rented an old house on half an acre surrounded by a stone wall. Jobs came easily to them. People could see by their open and unlined faces that something good was happening in their lives. Evan went to work for an insurance agency,…

Nicky licks my eyelids. He pins me down and licks my eyelids. You should hear what boys call me always looking for the tongue in my mouth because my lips are the only place on me with any fat like maybe once they got bit. I’m a small town so up go my fists and…

The first thing she finds is a hand. In the beginning, she thinks it’s a tangle of sheet or a wadded sock caught between the mattress cover and the mattress, a bump the size of a walnut but softer, more yielding. She feels it as she’s lying, lazing, in bed. Often, lately, her body keeps…