Fiction

  • A Day in the Future

    I n the future, everyone will be someone else. At her school, the future had been discussed as if it were a definite sort of business, with tangible boundaries like an island nation. It was a place you could rocket to or grope towards in a state of anticipation. But if thinking about your actual…

  • South

    They head south, and as they move out from under the dense Baltimore sky toward air and ocean and hot sun, Flo and Matthew beg their mother, Marie-Claude, to tell stories. Flo loves the ones about when Marie-Claude was as young as she is now, and Matthew wants to hear, over and over, how he…

  • Resistance

    Alvin Boudreaux had outlived his neighbors. His asbestos-siding house was part of a tiny subdivision built in the 1950’s, when everybody had children, a single-lane driveway, a rotating TV antenna, and a picnic table out back. Nowadays he sat on his little porch and watched the next wave of families occupy the neighborhood, each taking…

  • Police Chief’s Daughter

    from Citizens Review Then there was the police chief’s daughter, always bad news. Like tonight-another roasting summer night, air conditioners not quite keeping up-she sat alone at the bar, tapping her chipped fingernails against a glass. She took a last drag on the cigarette the fag gave her, a lousy, tasteless, low-tar wimp of a…

  • Votive: Vision

    She draws. She draws a door. On the windowpane in breath. Breathes on the glass and draws. A door, an O spells polio. Six years old. She dreams. Walks with her father again. River of glass. To the river of glass collecting bits of this and that to examine later under the microscope. To hold….

  • The Wake

    How many times since Elise’s death had her husband, Mitch, said numbly, Oh Christ, I can’t believe she’s gone, I don’t know what to do. And Joan replied helplessly, squeezing his hand, I know! I know. Of course, there wouldn’t be one-a wake. The deceased hadn’t been Catholic. Hadn’t been brought up in any church,…

  • Permanent

    Betty doesn’t know how much longer she can stall Mrs. Beatrice. For more than a month, the poor thing has tried to schedule an appointment. She phones and chats as if nothing is the matter, as if she hasn’t a care in the world, and Betty hopes that just this once she won’t ask, but…