More on: Short Stories

PETE DZIEDZIC’S TEETH lay buried a half-mile south of the Da Nang Air Base. There the lance corporal had quarreled with a private over who’d recorded “Sea of Love.” Guys in the outfit were singing along to Armed Forces Radio when Pete said, “That singer’s from the northern U.S.” “He’s from my hometown,” replied the…

YES, APPLY the Hippocratic Oath,” Paula Morriset said, so softly she doubted the young house surgeon, head bent over the consent form, indicating with his superior pen where she should sign, heard her. Then she took the thick silver pen and signed fluently, a good sign. Her mother, Lorna, now successfully sedated, her broken hip…

I DON’T KNOW how it was in other towns but here in Lifton the placards surfaced like mushrooms overnight, an eruption of truth-telling after a deluge of scandal and lies. Imagine the shock—the embarrassment—finding misery in the middle of your picture-perfect lawn, or envy casting its shadow over a garden filled with flowers, or monkey…

THE TASTE OF GRAPES was the taste south of his grandmother’s garage back home. Small as marbles, green and sour skinned—when you bit them, the skins spilt and squirted the globe of flesh into your mouth, smooth and soft; if there were any sweetness, this is where you would find it. He could not define…

  My knights and my servants and my true children, which be come out of deadly life into spiritual life, I will now no longer hide me from you, but ye shall see now a part of my secrets and of my hid things. ———————————————————————–—Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur THE AVIATOR HAD BEEN HEARING…

THE STOCK YOUNG MAN from the north, whose German mother had given him his blond curls and his Milanese father his brown eyes, was at twenty-six the youngest professor of zoology at the University of Pisa. He was driving today to a destination none of his departmental colleagues would have been caught dead at, midweek…

I EAT A BALONEY SANDWICH every day on my lunch break at Jo-Ann Fabrics. Yesterday, my father, who is close to enlightenment and who wanted to use my employee discount, came in looking for red fabric for a new prayer shawl. He saw mustard on the corner of my mouth and his eyes darkened, then…

LENT SHOULD BE in the summer that she might make use of the hotel pool, bandaged up outside like an open wound. She never had a pool. She had a cat but her cat is dead. Buried in leftover snow behind the garage until the ground softens. It would be nice to swim in a pool.…

THIS PLACE SUCKS. You can’t even fuck a guy in your own room.” The girl who said it was on the phone, looking back at the door through a thick tangle of dark hair as Rachel walked in. Her suitcase was already open on the bed by the window, clothes half settled into the dresser…

SHE’D BEEN Flying a Cessna, shooting practice take-offs and landings with a flight instructor at an Omaha airstrip that was just a windsock and one lane of unnumbered concrete runway veined with tar repairs. Richard Nixon was president, the month was September, the temperature was sixty degrees, and she was Karen Manion, mother of two.…