Fiction

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…

Marcia’s parents, who still lived in New Jersey, were truly happy when she came to live in the East again. Her father said, “Hey! That’s more like it,” when she first told them she was moving to New York. “About time!” her mother said. Nobody mentioned the years when they had been so bitterly against…

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….

The Man with the Spotted Dog I was sitting at an outdoor café across from the ocean in Florida when I spotted the man with the spotted dog. I thought it was interesting. Me at a seaside resort and a man with a spotted dog. It reminded me of the famous story where a man…

Green is the color that defines them, of course. They don’t realize yet, but it’s already there in the picture. Look closely, and Susan’s wearing a grass-green peridot and pearl ring on her engagement finger, for Jim, who’s coming to meet her as the S.S. Carinthia steams into New York Harbor. And Keith has on…

Rick had been searching for the Pillings’ address for over twenty minutes, and the hungrier he became, the harder it was to concentrate on the dimly lit street signs, the six-digit numbers stenciled on curbs. Westgate Village was a planned community an hour away from the downtown loft where Rick lived, and its street names…

In the summer of 1967, Nathan Bogmore never woke up before eleven o’clock. He was fourteen years old, and he slept with more intensity than he did anything else. Having just left the warm, rumpled mattress in the empty back room of their cottage, he stood at the front door in his pajamas, squinting into…