Fiction

Many people in New York City stay up all night. I am one of them. I don’t know who the other ones are. Except for Walter, and Walter says things like, “I think my fingerprints are wearing off.” Things like that, things other people don’t think about. At two a.m., my phone rings. “Get lost,”…

A few things straight up: I’m mounting my stag, later I’ll slash his throat, drain his blood; I’ll gut him and he’ll sate me, but for now he’s my prop. My foot pressed firmly upon his bloody breast, his hoof in my hand, I speak. My granddaddy was a Baptist minister, my daddy a newspaperman….

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…

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…