Fiction

after Natalia Ginzburg “The following essay, ‘He and I,’ captures the seesaw of human companionship and love with a patience and sensitivity to interconnectedness that it is hard to imagine a male essayist attempting, much less equaling.” -Phillip Lopate She is quintessentially French. I am, in the loosest sense of the word, American. She always…

Beatrice needed a new liver. Her old one had succumbed to damage suffered in a fall one month earlier from the top of a seven-story parking garage. She lay in a coma while the hospital prepared for her imminent transplant, but she was not asleep. That part of her which was not her broken body…

When it becomes possible to sleep with his brother’s wife, George Norgaard jumps at the chance. He has in fact been wanting to sleep with her for years: he’s spied on her at picnics, at Christmas, and once years ago they kissed too long-but nothing like this. Now they meet in hotels, in bars, at…

i. Other People I begin with what I see plainly, before and around me. There is much to curtail. To one side, my neighbors are a family, extremely nuclear in a contemporary way. There’s a mother, a father, a girl, and a boy, both children from previous marriages, the girl blond, the boy brunette, both…

She stood in the street, perplexed, as if she had just been dropped there. This was the late 1900’s in a Western European city much like any other, when the streets at lunch hour teemed with office slaves, like herself, with their sandwiches slightly wet from sitting in ice all morning, and most of each…

1. Those Absent Any reasonable baby shower would have properly culminated in the videocorder with the instant playback feature. The present was addressed to The Formerly Thin Addie Ling from her three tactless brothers, and arrived suspiciously wrapped in a brown paper grocery bag. There was no box or warranty card. If the camera was…

Bobby Bell’s fingers numbered four to a hand. His thumb and pointer were identical to God’s, but the other two were just fleshy stubs, stunted and fused on each slender paw. He was a dumb kid, besides, if progress in school is a fair measure. He sized me up my first week in town, then…

The organist pumped out the blurred tones of “Just as I Am,” the song sinking like a rusted hook in Jack’s chest. Jack locked his ankles, clenched his knees to the underside of the slick oak pew as his grandfather, Emmett, snored quietly beside him. Stop it. Please stop it, Jack said to the whirling…

The young woman in 15f stood looking out her window. Thousands of other windows-wavy rectangles, shaken towels of light-seemed to signal in code, You are not alone. Of course, she was not alone, anyway. Margaret turned back to the living room, where her Nebraska mother was sitting up very straight. “Twenty-eight is not old,” Margaret…