Fiction

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…

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…

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…

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…

High up, in the towers of the public housing project, Laura Providencia and her mother, her brother, Angel, and her little sister, Rosita, lived under siege. In the elevator that smelled like a urinal, the junkies bobbed devotionally. The walls of the long hallways teemed with the exploding alphabet, the declamations, white, screaming, “Paco of…

It was a simple choice, the way she figured, and I still think she was right. Either she went willingly, ignoring everything still unsettled, or she could refuse and risk guilt for the rest of her life. So there really was no choice. She made a reservation, bought a suitcase, and headed for the airport….

She was dozing on a faded Navajo blanket with the filmy shade of a maple tree drawn like a veil across her skin. Her blouse was still opened to where he’d unbuttoned it down to the sky blue of the bra she’d brought back as a souvenir from Italy. Martin was lying just beyond the…