Category: Fiction

A long time ago, a lifetime ago, really, I rented a lovely summer house by the sea. Not exactly by the sea, but close enough, and it had a big pool, and five bedrooms and a sunroom and an English box garden and you could see the ocean from a widow’s walk on the roof.…

  Your wife had left you post-diagnosis yet here you were this night stumbling on fire with dance and blood, a retired high school Spanish teacher, now learning the new syntax of multiple sclerosis. It burned from your hands and feet, the castanets, the dark mole on the flamenco dancer’s cheek, All the broken stomping,…

To lose an oak is no heartbreak. —No, but to see them go by the acre, at a stroke, is enough to crack a man open, the heart not broken so much as stricken, torqued at the root and left in a thick choke of ache. Just so, a whole forest’s felling will take faith’s…

“I’m home!” Lydia cries out. “Dov’è la biblioteca?” says Lyle. He’s at the stove, his back to her, tossing something into a pot. His voice is steady, reassuring, as seductive as the all-night jazz radio host who inhabits the parallel universe that of late has revealed itself to Lydia—a world populated with graveyard shift workers,…

Last week we played out the deathbed scene and it wasn’t a life-changing experience, but with Dad dead my tool collection tripled. I have enough power drills to arm a framing crew, which I do in fact arm, since I run a framing crew. We’re the guys who put up the outlines of houses—braces, trusses,…

At Miriam’s insistence, Estelle scheduled her flight so they could meet at the concourse and cab into the city together. She supposes that, given their mission, there’s a likelihood one of them might back out, and really, neither should be alone as they approach the business at hand, the crime. Estelle is the first passenger…