Fiction

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…

A turquoise silk scarf, elegantly long, and narrow; so delicately threaded with pale gold and silver butterflies, you might lose yourself in a dream contemplating it, imagining you’re gazing into another dimension or another time in which the heraldic butterflies are living creatures with slow, pulsing wings. Eleven years old, I was searching for a…

1 We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases, and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey: songs about mournful mothers looking through graves for their dead sons; songs about the…

Gina had all the symptoms: sleep disturbances, hot flashes, irritability, weight gain, loss of libido, aching joints, and heart palpitations. The one she complained of most was hot flashes, which she dealt with by throwing off her clothes and cursing. As far as Evan was concerned, her irritability was the worst symptom; she was increasingly…

There were only a few perfect spots in the world, and Leo Spivak had finally found one of them, right here in Mendocino. He was stretched out just inside the screen door of the brown-shingled beachfront cottage he and his wife, Rachel, had rented for a week-just the two of them, alone in all this…

I won’t tell you my name. I don’t know who you are; maybe you’d pass my name on, and there are many whom I fear now. I would love it if I had nothing to tell you. I have lost nearly everything-country, family, name-but I have retained my honor and gained a story, to my…