Fiction

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….

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…

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….

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,…

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…

On his way home from the Holland Park Underground Station, James Briggs had a curious sense of event in the windless, autumn evening. The house in which he lived with his wife and their one-and-a-half-year-old son was in a square, and in the garden of the square a fire was burning, the high, cracking flames…

I met my best pal, Phil, about ten years ago through our mutual wife. I was a young actor on the rise then, a couple of years out of Julliard, I’d done two seasons of Biloxi Blues (Broadway and a touring company) and although I was raised as a nice Jewish boy, I kept getting…