Fiction

When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed very hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces. The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious…

At first when the captain’s voice came on over the intercom and made the announcement, she felt almost glad. Not gleeful exactly, but a sudden ching! of recognition coursed through her; events fell into place. She was glad she’d had her weekend at the hotel, glad for her swim in the hotel pool, for sleeping…

The River I’ll admit I picked Ecuador for its symbolic possibilities. I wanted a place where things were reliable: twelve hours of darkness, twelve hours of light. It was the end of the old year, two weeks before my thirty-third birthday, the age my Catholic friend Tony said all things would be revealed to me….

Right in front of everyone at Two-Bit’s Worth, my last girlfriend called me unfit to drink in public, and I told her she was heavyset and that, after three months dating, I had come to realize she would always be heavyset. In this ugly way she walked out of my life for good. I was…

In 1967, when I was ten years old, my mother married Harlan Frame, and we moved that summer to a house he’d bought for us in Slaughter, Texas. Harlan was a farmer, a word my mother found too plain; she’d tell people Harlan ranched, though he kept fewer than a dozen cows on a patch…

Was this your first, uh, infidelity, Mrs. Kennedy?” asked the somewhat prissy, prurient marriage counselor, to whom Arabel and Bertram Kennedy had gone after her teary confession that she loved another man-a very young man, Richard, not only unemployed in a gainful way but a poet, whom she meant to marry. A pause, while both…

She knew she would not reach Cole Cole even before she started to walk, knew she could not do twenty-five kilometers in the sand with this pack. These new boots, she had learned on her last hike with Freyda, were a half size too short, had bruised her big toenails on the Towers of Paine…

The note was slipped to me on Wednesday, July 20th, at two minutes before three. I know the exact time because I happened to be staring at my watch, wondering if Dr. V. would be running late today, as she sometimes did, when the double doors burst open, and Peacock Throne walked out. I called…

On the morning of July 23, 1921, my parents, Cowley and Elizabeth Russet, died in the crash of a zeppelin at the fairgrounds in Fleming Park. They had each paid fifty cents to ride in the gondola, to float and drift over Halifax, the harbor, then back to Fleming Park. That day, I had been…