Year: 2006

  • A Rope Trick

    In August 1924, one year after a honeymoon tour of India, Alain Coulbec pushed my grandmother down the servants’ stairs at their country home outside Paris. Bruised but uninjured, she promptly pushed the noted aviator from family history, fleeing to Tahoe with her trust fund and newborn son. It didn’t matter that Coulbec had crossed…

  • The Interruption

    I heard a story at my great-aunt’s place that I told to my sister long-distance on the phone. Well, first I said, “Did you know her real name?,” because I knew or suspected that my sister did not. I will not repeat it here. But one of the cousins, a man whom I had never…

  • All in a Dream: Sketches and Fables

    Soon Enough They Would All Drown A horse emerged from the woods, sleepwalking through the fog, its eyes literally closed. The hooves of the sleepwalking horse were long and yellow and curled like the toes of elf shoes. There was lightning in the blue windows of a tree house, where scientists were hunched in the…

  • When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

    When Felix’s special phone rang at 2:00 in the morning, Kelly rolled over and punched him in the shoulder and hissed, “Why didn’t you turn that fucking thing off before bed?” “Because I’m on call,” he said. “You’re not a fucking doctor,” she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed’s edge, pulling on…

  • Animal Crackers

    “Want an animal cracker?” Renee asked, as they pulled away from a Shell along route 80. While Jack had pumped gas and cleaned the windshield, she’d gone in to buy bottled waters. They’d just crossed the Platt River, and had another day’s drive before them. “I didn’t know they still made these,” Renee said. “I…

  • Just for the Hell of It, Ione Said Yes

    In the spring of 1965, Ione Butts, sole proprietor of the Knight’s Best Motor Lodge, widow of the handsome asshole Henry Butts, and mother to a ten-year-old child, inadvertently acquired a sixty-foot knight in shining armor. A man named Franklin Tort came into the motel office with his hat in his hands and said: “I…