Fiction
Fiction
One Last Thing
She said she wouldn’t leave me and I believed her. She stared at me with those big, colorless eyes, half-smile, waiting. She was never the patient sort. “Do it,” she said. Every time she asked, the thought of the guard and the seven other inmates listening and responding made me hesitate, but only momentarily. “Would
Gabriel García Márquez and the Solitude of Imagination
José Arcadio Buendía spent the long months of the rainy season shut up in a small room that he had built in the rear of the house so that no one would disturb his experiments. Having completely abandoned his domestic obligations, he spent entire nights in the courtyard watching the course of the stars and
The Psychic Vampire
An arsenal of fears has shaped my behavior. I’ve been abused and abandoned so many times in my life that I always feel betrayed, powerless, and vulnerable. I can’t shake the belief that I’ve been deprived of true love along the way, so when I do manage relationships, I see myself as flawed and unwanted.
The Crumbling Structure
Billy grew up watching his home deteriorate. Behind a veneer of nonchalant plastic prosperity, creeping damp and dry rot spread relentlessly. Every possible creature comfort populated the interior: colour TVs, soft furnishings, wardrobes crammed with flashy clothes. Yet behind it all, the walls crumbled and flowered with fungus. The wallpaper reeled and peeled, its jagged
Running from Death
Mitch bit into another slice of pizza and took a guess at who would win the BBQ Pitmasters episode he was watching. The judges awarded the grand prize to a team from Georgia. Mitch muttered, “I knew it.” He hoisted himself off of the sofa and headed toward the kitchen for another beer. He was
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Novels and Collected Works
An Easter Story
Nothing had broken Leo’s way that year. In January, he lost a battle with his mortgage company that cost him his home. His wife left him in February, taking their two children and the family dog with her. She said she was tired of being ignored. He told her he didn’t want to hear about
A Bunch of Felonies
You know, that’s what my sockeyetrist told me. “Catherine,” he said, “you’ve got a person in you, another person besides you, and that person is all the time telling you, ‘Catherine, you’re no good, Catherine, you can’t do thus and that.’ And you are trying to become yourself, but that
Raymond Carver, Remembered
For those who weren’t writing back in the nineteen eighties, it’s hard to imagine what a broad shadow Raymond Carver cast across the writing world. His work, and articles about him, seemed to appear everywhere, including The Paris Review, Atlantic, Poetry, and The New Yorker. In his final year, 1988, he was inducted into the
Uncle Bill
Alice Randall drove along a desolate road amid the soaked barren wheat fields of northern Kansas. Stands of bare trees separated neighboring properties. Every so often, she would spot hunters in orange vests wandering over the dark wet soil. When she reached Masonville, she took a brief tour of the town to see what had
A Quiet Christmas
Scott woke up at 5 a.m. on Christmas morning, threw on some warm clothes, and took his dog Jasper for a long walk in the darkness. Jasper plunged into a few snow drifts along the way, his tail wagging and his breath creating a fine mist in the chill morning air. They played fetch in