Fiction

T he squad was made up of three girls from a school. The girls’ names was Debbie, Donna, and Shenay. They was stalwart, steady, and statuesque, always going round not hurting old people or weak boys but helping them. They strolled down Ronald Drive and Cahill Street to Nathalie Avenue to way over to Jefferson…

There were two women I thought might be able to help me, or rather help Lance, and that night, sitting on the bus on the way home from the hospital, I vowed to find one or both of them the next day, even if I had to cancel a couple of my afternoon classes to…

Later the squat white cylinders with their delicate indentations would be revealed as a species of lantern. But when Krzysztof Wojciechowicz first glimpsed them, dotted among the azaleas and rhododendrons and magnolias surrounding Constance Humboldt’s kidney-shaped swimming pool, he saw them as dolls. The indentations cut the frosted tubes like waists, a third of the…

The Buffalo Vision Late on the third night of the Sun Dance, most of the hundred Crow people within the Big Lodge had fallen asleep. The fire was low, the singers’ voices hoarse over the drumbeat. Only John Sees the Hill still danced in place, his back to the circular wall of upright aspen boughs….

Peter had always been more than thoughtful in not pressing her about her past, and Beatrice was sure it was a reason for her choice of him. Most men, coming of age in a time that extolled openness and disclosure, would have thought themselves remiss in questioning her so little. Perhaps because he was a…

S andalwood, Jaime whispers to himself, recalling the vendor who had sold Tony and him the three little vials of this scented oil and the five foil packets of incense. He had a makeshift stall outside the bus terminal in Dudley Square. Wearing an embroidered red and black tarboosh and an immaculately white T-shirt, on…

from The Farewell Symphony   Tomorrow is Toussaint in Paris, All Saint’s Day, and I suppose I’ll visit Brice’s little white marble plaque in the columbarium at Père Lachaise. Why do I avoid it for months on end? I keep thinking of a couple of Americans we met during the year before Brice died. One…

For more than a year, I thought Roman had disappeared from my life. If not for our very adequate postal service, he might have, but the last week of August, I open the mailbox to find an envelope that has been stamped: Moved No Forwarding Address, with an arrow drawn to the return address, tiny…

We were sipping grappa, watching The Tragic Stiletto of Trabzon on an old Zenith TV in a suburban public square outside of Patras. Though it was dusk, and the images were murky, the film looked familiar, like a dim photo resolving in its pan. My wife and I were trying to read the lips of…