Fiction

They’re free to run anywhere they like whenever they like, so they do. The land falls away from their small house on the hill along a prickly path; there’s a dirt road, a pasture where the steer are kept, swamps, a gully, groves of fruit trees, and then the creek from whose far bank a…

When we were children, my brother, Frank, and I handled our mother’s danger signals differently. Mama could pluck a word from a simple statement, then snap it back covered with ice. Her very blue eyes could deepen from midday sky-blue to late-afternoon darkening blue, or worse, to night-charged-with-lightning blue. Her normal alto-toned voice could rise…

for Margaret At the edge of a river and the end of a road, a blue-eyed boy lived with his mother and five sisters. The women sewed wedding gowns for every girl from every town. But not one of the river woman’s daughters made a dress for herself. They were too plain, too fat, too…

He was walking down the highway, Ohio SR 4 between Union City and Butler, singing at the top of his voice. He carried a green plaid suit in a clear plastic garment bag. He did not bother to hitchhike, to actually turn every now and then and lift a thumb. By the city limits sign…

We were both sitting in old-fashioned green metal lawn chairs that rocked back gently on metal tube frames if you wanted them to, and I did. I rocked as I sipped the strong, lemony tea up through the straw, hoping Mrs. Eelpout would tell me a story. She was sniffling, still getting used to the…

When I decided to ask Recita Holguin to marry me, I visited my confessor, The Bishop, in his place of banishment. He is not a bishop now, but he was once. “Red!” he said. “Red!” And he hugged me close, his cheek and ear pressed hard against my chest. He stepped back, and raised up…

I grew up in Garden City, a small Pennsylvania community where my brother, Adrian, and I were the only Jews in our elementary school. I got along better with the kids than Adrian, played sports and made friends more easily, but still I had my troubles. One day I went into Mrs. Nick’s-short for Nicodemus-a…

In the room in Mexico where they finally reunited, Bird knelt by the bed, Kin lay on it as he’d done for weeks, and JJ settled into the canvas butterfly chair at its foot. Bird often knelt by Kin’s bed these days, as if praying-which she also often did these days, though not on her…

In 1969, except for the yearly wardrobe changes of the young officers’ wives, Randolph Air Force Base had barely acknowledged the decade. The young officers discussed shoeshines, the laundry that put the sharpest crease in their everyday khakis, which colonel gave the best TDY. Friday afternoons the wives met them at the Officers Club. The…