Category: Fiction

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…

My grandfather wanted to tell me the story of the horse that died of heartache. “What are you thinking?” my grandmother said. The horse’s name was Sully, my grandfather said. (Which must have meant something quite different in another language. I did not ask.) “A beauty,” he said. He said it was true, the story…

“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…

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…

The blizzard shook the whole town like a cuff on the head and in ten minutes our house was not visible from the park across the street. It was a blessing and it obliterated the Christmas Day funk that had fallen over everything. There had been a two-day thaw and the old snow and raw…

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…