Fiction
Charcoal
At first I didn’t understand what I would be guarding. When they said “cave paintings,” I pictured canvases hidden underground, like art stolen by the Nazis, but they turned out to be drawings of animals, in charcoal, right on the walls of a cave. Nobody in the village knew about the cave before then, except …
Cartography
It seemed the problem of my adolescence was the yellow line. The Nubian God slapped the switch on the wall and peeled the quasi-converted space in half by light. Toward the end of the driveway, my skateboard lay on its side like a capsized tanker. Beyond that, the solid yellow line. Like the stripe down …
Marco Polo
George can hold his breath underwater for a very long time. Take for instance now, as he reaches his one hundred and fiftieth Mississippi here in Nicole Petr’s dad’s mansion’s pool. He’s been submerged long enough that he can almost pretend there’s no water at all. But he’s got his eyes open, and he can …
Shattering
The man becomes a dolphin in her dreams. Only briefly, he is a shining silver arc above her, and then, when his hips push down between her legs he’s a man again. The air is bright around him. His shoulders are rounded, his eyes closed, his mouth is open, gasping. She had thought he looked …
Lost and Found
Falling into step with the boy, Thisman draws close and whispers in a voice only for him. Says, “I wish I had a little boy just like you. I wish you were my own,” and the boy believes it, every single word. He is lost, but not in the way he has been taught to …
Pie and Whiskey
I love Connie to death, really I do, but sometimes she takes things too far. Other times she won’t take things far enough, depending on the thing at hand, but mostly it’s too far she takes everything else. Her cold remedy includes a pound and a half of raw beef tenderloin, eight to twelve shots …
The Beast Room
The woman unlocked the door and pushed the child ahead of her into the attic room. She held the candle just above the child’s head. "You will sleep here,'' she said. At first in the dim light the child could see only the bed. It was a large bed, like a heap of gray wool …
Cimex Lectularius
Whenever I see an exterminator company's vehicle on the street I think what a boon such a service would have been to the set tlers of the Rosebud Country of South Dakota. Mass exterminations were unknown in those days. They were an individual or a family matter, carried out painstakingly by hand. There were no …
Homecoming
He watched the car turn and dip away through a wide stretch of houses that crowded a smudge of far smoke streaming above a slow-fading curve of tall factory chimneys. To the left the downtown heights towered, remote and faint, over the smoke-pennoned river. The city trembled before him like a creation out of his …