Fiction

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,…

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…

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…

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…

We were almost out of money, so Trace went to steal us another bottle of something. We were celebrating. The holiday weekend was almost over, and the mechanic was due back in town the next morning. We’d finally be able to get back on the road. I sat on the rear bumper of the van…

Uncle Lake and Aunt Bobette lived just off the La Loma bridge that crossed the Arroyo Seco. Right after the bridge, you made your first left-their house was classic Pasadena, a craftsman house with a low-pitched roof, exposed rafters, dark wood shingles, and a sleeping porch vined with wisteria and grape, drab green and idle…

Kai opened her eyes and looked around her. She was disoriented until she saw the Canadian customs booth in front, with the maple leaf decal on one of the glass panes. She realized she had fallen asleep, missing both the customs booth on the U.S. side and the Ambassador Bridge. Now she and Bailey were…

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…