Fiction

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…

A duppy by default, he was drowned, but he came out of the sea. Never dead, he said, though who would believe him? Life raft, he explained, but his employers-a graying pair, nondescript Anglicans who already spoke of the Will of God to describe his disappearance-now spoke of that same Will to describe his appearance….

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…