Fiction

  • Israel

    He brought vanilla candles. Some gift. My mother squeezed them into old silver on the mantle and lit each one. They scorched the wall. Even our best sofas couldn’t make up for the cheesy, rundown way the wall looked now. Still, this was London, not New York, and my mother didn’t even seem to notice….

  • The Mourning Party

    To an outsider, the grieving at the Burns Bungalows looked like revels. Mrs. Oates, the registered guest, counted five men climbing the hill to the main office with six-packs of beer in each hand. Women came, too, bearing plates covered with dishtowels, babies, or crock pots in their arms, or long bottles wrapped in paper…

  • False Confessions

    The author of this story had other plans for me. In his, alas, typical ignorance and ineptitude, he decided to use me (one more time!) as the heavy, a really bad guy in a bleak and downbeat story that most likely would gross you out or, in any case, would sure enough give you the…

  • Other People’s Mothers

    While Wanda had an abortion, I had lunch with her mother. “Please,” Wanda had said, swathed in large paper napkins, “just get her away from here.” Then she closed her eyes, and her boyfriend, Ramon, nodded, so I took Wanda’s mother to a Chinese dumpling shop. Once there, she told me the old story about…

  • Gray Girl

    The year my father’s molar disintegrated was also the year my half brother died. The two were related. “Willpower!” my father said. “I will keep my tooth from decaying.” But decay it did. Every day he’d show us his molar as proof of the immense powers of his will. We saw the hole grow bigger,…

  • Remaining in Favor

    Let me ask you, have you ever, you know, faked an orgasm with me?” Frank asks Lise. They’re in a crowded restaurant just off Madison. Lise looks up from her softshell crabs to see if the diners at the nearby tables are staring. This question is unlike Frank; it’s direct and uncharming. “Well, when we…

  • The Beautiful Days

    In the days of his youth, Aldo often found himself-as many of us did-in a state of grace, and the sensation in his boundless filling heart resembled, to his mind, the transports of love. His Midwestern college, set down in the middle of a cornfield and isolated from any big city by fifty miles of…

  • The Hull Case

    Of modern North American cases one of the earliest and most widely reported abductions occurred in the early sixties to a mixed race couple in New Hampshire . . . -K. Clifford Stanton, Taken: 12 Contemporary UFO Abduction Narratives Bessie is telling the colonel about the ship now, and Bernie, sitting stiffly on the sectional…