Category: Fiction

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…

The heat rose into the clearest dawn I’d ever seen. A corridor of one hundred men extended a quarter mile, their yellow hardhats bobbing against the gray terrain, the ring of their spike malls, the clang of their shovels quickly swallowed up by an endless flatland of dust, sagebrush, and rattlesnakes. I’d been given an…

The brightness that sustains me is meant to blow away. Almost every day, I walk down to the college to watch the Buddhist nuns. The young Tibetans fold themselves crossed-legged on the wooden platform, funneling colored sand grain by grain onto a chalked pattern in the center. They wear cloth masks so their breath doesn’t…

Some of you I would hope have read Dianne Hart’s monograph Enough Is Enough: Prodigality Celebrated and Condemned in the Carter-Era Recordings of Barbra Streisand. Although Dr. Hart’s study is limited in scope, her thinking is expansive. My own forthcoming book on Streisand’s middle period is indebted to her penetrating analyses. I must also thank…

As the babysitter gathers up her schoolbooks and coat, William’s wife whispers—he catches the faint musk of bourbon still on her breath—that she will wait up for him while he drives the girl home. Then she winks, sort of. Gina has never been able to close just one eye without contorting her entire face. Tonight,…

When someone’s standing at a bus stop with a human head wrapped in a shawl or tucked in a bag, it’s easy enough to stop them from boarding a bus. Simply move away from your coffee at the table on the bar’s patio. Catch the bus driver’s eye as you walk. He will either keep…