More on: Short Stories

CHARLOTTE HAD NO NOTION of blasting the top off Major Tidwell’s tall and elaborate Woodmen of the World monument. It was shaped like a tree with its limbs sawn off and, as anyone could see, it was an easy mark. Under normal circumstances, she would never have dreamed of it. The only reason she did…

  ONE WILL ROSS NOVEL was a bestseller in the sixties, another earned six figures after its advance and brought in a few hundred each year, but hardly anybody read his twenty-some books anymore, and when he was invited to the odd conference in South Dakota or South Carolina, attendees were surprised he was alive and…

GWEN LIVED IN LOS ANGELES and her brother Dan lived in Chicago. They sent each other spoof news reports, fake X-ray glasses, envelopes full of plastic ants. After the horrible-smelling flowers were delivered to her at work—“What is that, road kill?” asked her friend—Gwen gleefully bought a pound of chocolates, stuck her thumb through the bottom…

A Narrative of Howling Wolf, 1875–78 Fort Marion Prisoner, Saint Augustine, Florida   THE WAVES KEPT COMING like the cavalry. We stood on the wall of the fort and stared at the water. We rocked back and forth with the waves. We were prisoners of the Plains Indian Wars. We were stultified. We were sick.…

DON’T TOUCH MY CHILD,” the woman said. She and her son stood in front of me in the checkout line. Her son looked to be four, maybe five. A towhead. I had placed my hand on the short-cropped sunlight for the barest moment. The mother turned the boy toward me and pointed at my face. “Do…

I DON’T CARE how long you’ve been teaching. Nothing prepares you to handle a fastidious sixteenth-century theologian who wants to write romance novels. A great many questions sprang to mind when John Calvin strode into our classroom that first night. What had he been doing with himself for the past five hundred years? Why a…

Balthazar KING Balthazar loved the freshness of his gardens and smiled to see the reflection of his ebony face in the clear water of the tanks. And he loved the joyfulness, the commotion, and the abundance of banquets, and often his parties lasted till daybreak. However, late one night, after all the guests had withdrawn,…

M Y SISTER, SONDRA, stood on my porch smoking a cigarette, just like she does every Wednesday while her son practices soccer at the school three blocks from my house. “Alisa, you ever been around one of them savants? Like the one that was in that movie Rain Man?” Cigarette smoke rose and fought against the…

S HE WAS A BEAUTIFUL child and then a beautiful girl who seemed protected by an aura of goodness so that lascivious men kept their thoughts to themselves and didn’t lay a hand on her. But one afternoon her luck ran out during a hurricane which brushed New England in September of 1948. Her mother’s…

AND SO I CAME to Muping and discovered the panda. Yes, I discovered him! I had traveled far and wide through China by then, from the plains to the mountains, from the desert to the sea. I had discovered hundreds of new species of flora and fauna: the butterfly bush and blue corydalis, the small snow finch,…