Fiction

Hello, readereaper. It’s certainly been a while. May I take your coat? It is four a.m. and my parents and sister are gone to North Carolina for two weeks’ vacation, which means I have the house to myself. So: I come out of the bathroom and the cat is sitting on top of the humidifier…

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….

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…

By the third occasion-she couldn’t exactly call them “dates”-Mira thought she had him figured out. Before that she had not been able to determine whether he was a crazy person acting sane or a sane person acting crazy. She had met him through the personals. His ad had described him as “energetic” and “ambitious,” and…

I am a good confidante, and I’ll tell you the secret: never offer advice, merely listen. You may repeat, ratify, sympathize, query, even divulge a tidbit or two, whip up the objective correlative, but you must never give an opinion about what your friend should do next. Never, never, never. The summer of my separation…

Why was it, Janice thought, that everything took longer than you wanted? Like life. It was the last day of summer, their last day together, and all the way upstate her mother went on about Cornell-the boys she dated, the friends she made-going “oh,” and “oh!” over the radio until Janice’s head went completely blank,…

I liked Gretchen better when she wasn’t trying to kill me. Here’s what she used: a Colt .38; a heavy-handled hatchet; a pair of powder-blue knitting needles (one in each ear, a quick thrust, and I’d be gonzo, Gretchen said); and a gleaming silver-tipped syringe, its cylinder filled with something thick and yellow. This was…

Murphy calls, says he wants to meet me down at the Chagrin River after work. “Fish and talk,” he says. I can hear machines in the background, people shouting. “When’s after work?” “Punching the clock now,” he says. “And?” “And I have a favor to ask.” I hang up, give the radio ten minutes to…