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…

Part Two Section One   1. Not far from here, at the end of River Run, is a group of streets named by the Mave brothers for the members of their family: John, the father; Marguerite; and her brothers, Charles and James. At the end of the main road was the house where John Joseph…

She’s just dying to see you, so excited, and you really can’t refuse a ninety-two-year-old,” said Miles Henry to his old friend Grace Lafferty, the famous actress, who was just passing through town, a very quick visit. Miles and Grace were getting on, too, but they were nowhere near the awesome age of ninety-two, the…

I was born on the grounds of the Mount Mohonk Hospital for the Insane, where my father was Chief of Psychiatry, and because of this I grew accustomed to the sounds of misery before I went to sleep at night. I would lie in bed upstairs in my family’s house, which was situated one hundred…

One of the few friends I have left asks the question. As a poet, you would expect him not only to ask but to answer. “How do we know the agenda of love?” he asks and elaborates, “If you expose the heart, it can split wide open.” “So why do we love?” I ask him….

I had to ask someone how to find the criminal court building, so apparently I’d led a sheltered life. A woman directed me to Franklin Street and said I couldn’t miss it. I walked east toward the hulking gray walls which dead-end that part of the city. It was the cold Monday after New Year’s….

I meet my father in a restaurant. He knows why I have asked to meet him, but he swaggers in anyway. It’s a place near his office, and he hands out hellos all around as he makes his way over to my table. “My daughter,” he explains to the men who have begun to grin,…

Celestine Truxa was born in Salzburg on the eve of Metternich’s coronation as prince. According to the midwife, her mother split up the middle like a birch tree hit by lightning, managing to stay alive just long enough to see her daughter’s face lodged in the crook of her husband’s arm, eloquent of birth and…