Fiction

Throughout the month of August, I watched as Matthew gathered important belongings into piles around the house wherever there was a little space. The pile of sox, the pile of…

The circumstances surrounding Donna’s death make me feel uncharacteristically mellow. Waterlogged garlic peels wreathe the sink. I notice how much they look like miniature tea bags. Our dinner guests left…

I spotted her when I rounded a bend. She was by the side of the road, in the shadow of trees which line old Route 19, a slow narrow route…

Margaret suddenly had a yearning for cake. Chocolate cake. She had six boxes of cake mix to choose from in the pantry. She took two from the shelf and set…

Laura allows herself this. Allows herself this first moment to stand under the stream of near-scalding water. Really it only feels this way. The water is nowhere near scalding because…

The first time I saw Rita she was watering her lawn. Our house had come fully furnished yet there were no curtains. I was sitting Indian style on the sofa…

After I escaped from my husband I found this place on a street with no name. Luigi the landlord calls it his street. He plays village headman, doling out advice…

My mother-in-law waited in her hospital room while my husband and I sat in the doctor’s office. Our son, Kei, slept across my lap, his temple sweating against my forearm.…

I hurry home, pull into the driveway, open the trunk, and grab all six plastic grocery bags. Dropping the bags on the kitchen counter, I go out to the living…

I let Timmy stay home the next day. I take some aspirin and go to work. “You look like shit,” Janice says when she settles in at eight-twenty. “I stopped…

The day was the way you’d paint it, with Gauguin blue for sky, sweet dianthus in the air and the future floating all of us right off the chinky concrete…