Fiction

Glenn Thrip failed to notice the bullet hole in the rear window of his pickup until several days later, after they had removed his wisdom teeth. Snowed on codeine, he was clearing the Nissan’s floor of pennies, trying to extract the keys from beneath the mat, when he looked up and saw the fresh Amnesty…

Hard to believe how popular I was. At Mt. Ephraim High School where I was in ninth grade that spring. Counted ten, twelve, sixteen, nineteen new friends! Not just boys in my class but popular juniors and seniors, athletes began to notice me, smiled and called me Doll, Doll-girl, Ingrid, In-grie. Word spreads fast, who…

Alberto Perera, librarian, granted no credibility to police profiles of dangerous persons. Writers, down through the centuries, had that look of being up to no good and were often mistaken for smugglers, assassins, fugitives from justice-criminals of all sorts. But the young man invading his sanctum, hands hidden in the pockets of his badly soiled…

Having begun the day with a headache, Bonnie Saks was not particularly surprised to find herself finishing it the same way. Pain, in her experience, never disappeared; it merely retreated for a while and then came back when least convenient in another form. Like men, she thought. All afternoon there had been a chilly, puttering…

Ellie found her son in the school nurse’s office, laid out on a leatherette fainting couch like some child gothic, his shoes off, his arms crossed over his chest, his face turned to the wall. “What’s the deal, Kid Cody?” When he heard her voice, he turned only his head toward her, slowly, as if…

In those days, this was how you got to my place: Down from Ruidoso and Ski Apache, you took U.S. 70 (yes, the very route Billy the Kid, notorious bandito and youngster, hightailed horse-style to freedom in olden times) through Tularosa, past Ray’s Tire and Lube and the C & C Restaurant and Lounge, into…

Jen and I were driving through New Mexico with her father, who was a retired insurance guy just a few years older than me, a tall, thin guy with a swatch of white hair that slipped across his scalp as if it had fallen there from a tree. Jen thought this trip would be a…

Heitman, the queerbait, the insane, is my tentmate. Again. Porter, the fat kid who cries a lot, cried again this morning, saying he didn’t want to tent with Heitman ever again. Last night Heitman put ticks on Porter’s eyelashes while he slept. This morning our Scoutmaster, Casper, had to pluck them off with tweezers, since…

In the late winter of 1985, John Rogan had been a surgeon for almost thirty-five years, and though still active and vital, a tall, erect, white-haired man, with a reputation for audacity matched by success, he was thinking of retiring. His older brother, also a surgeon, had apparently committed suicide the year before. He had…