Category: Fiction

“Have an apple, Love,” I tell you, choosing the largest one from the silver bowl on our breakfast table. The apple sits on my palm, a peace offering. “Not now,” you say. I’m shaking – the fruit, my hand. It’s that fight we had...

The rain pounded on the roof while the sickening smell of the flowers in his nostrils added to the lump in his throat. Knowing what he was about to do gnawed at him as a tearful haze clouded his eyes. All so vivid, it could have...

I wouldn’t have even found it if I hadn’t needed something for a costume party. We were supposed to dress as if we were from an earlier time. My mother certainly was, so I thought the things stored in her closet might have...

Cuz of Ginny, Wes was out here by the lake. What’d happened last week. They’d been drinking and dancing at the Blue Spot, mixing it up with friends, like most Friday nights. When the large stranger emerged by the bar, hadn’t...

“Hey, Liar!” I’d pulled my new car over to the right to talk to a neighbor named Jim. The mail had just been delivered, and my friend Jim was walking across his green lawn under the sweeping branches of a maple tree, thumbing...

The hiss and steady, low thumping of machines assaulted the hallway air. White uniformed men and women, occasionally one in a black smock and pants, cruised throughout. What type of shoes do they wear? They make no noise except...

Mrs. Weiss was too busy to die. She backhanded the doctor, a good five years younger than her still-finding-himself son; the chicken scratch notes from her medical chart went flying everywhere. She leapt off the examining table...

The Office I’ve been summoned to the C suite by the head of marketing. “Olsen, I got a hot prospect banging down the door, a Mr. Goddeaux, eager for Working Model Consultants to weigh in on his operation. I can’t spare anybody...

I get a glimpse of my future once riding the 104 downtown. An elderly couple bickering. She, curved around the pole leading to the door well in the middle of the bus; he, still planted in his seat, fiddling with the torn and...

1964. The Bronx. At 11 years old, I had a baseball card collection with over two hundred fifty trading cards I kept in an A&P grocery cardboard box under the bed. My cards were alphabetically organized by baseball team, each...

Like jamming an ax into our necks, Mrs. Gallager shoved her foot on the brakes of the school bus. Our heads crashed against the backs of the gray metal seats in front of us. Our silence was spewing out of our gaping mouths. Then...

The sky was a deeper blue than our own. Blue enough that the distant mountains merged with it almost without notice. The hills were closer, surrounding me like a thick woven carpet speckled with little stone houses embedded in a...