Category: Fiction

72 Degrees You’re wide awake at six a.m. when the sun tips its hand. You barely slept at all last night in the hot box that is your cramped third-floor apartment. There’s no air-conditioning, the windows are all propped open. You spent most the night on top of the sheets, waiting for a breeze that…

Chucho and I were searching for golf balls in the protected wetland on the twelfth hole when my feet found a body. There were already several hundred golf balls sitting on the edge of the marsh ready to be cleaned and sold and I’d dug my feet into the mud expecting to feel the cool…

Enough of us to constitute a class, a phyla, is what the redhead who cleans the Petri dishes calls us. He is taking us away from twisting our legs into DNA under our desks or leafing through bio periodicals in the library for Big Ideas so opposite sexes might fall into awe of us, he…

For multifarious and age-old reasons the dense central city was girdled by a wide belt of poverty. Near the southern edge of this shabby cincture lay a large village. Within the village was a sandy square of sixty meters in which children played and adults gathered to talk. Everyone crossed it as they went about…

I came here to lose. But the wheel won’t let me. Once again I pile all of my chips on three. People gasp. What are the odds for winning eight straight-ups in a row? Fools! Don’t they know wheels do not hold memory? That math and luck never go together? With roulette, every spin is…

You have to get out of the house. That’s what he always says, on those rare occasions he’s home and not on the road. Or he’s on the road, on the phone, from his hotel. You have to get out of the house. Spoken truly like someone who has no idea how difficult it is…