Fiction
Cry Room
The church looked normal from the outside. All steepled and angular in the way of good, rural Indiana churches of a certain age. Red brick and stained glass, St. Thomas Aquinas, surrounded on three sides by hot asphalt parking.
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Fiction
Sacred Cows
Clara Maloney peered down the long Brooklyn block. She and baby Sally had been waiting in the cold for twenty minutes, and still no sign of Pop. Figured. Even to pick out his wife’s casket, the old man was late.
Fiction
Chew
Anton’s American soldier had whipped out the torn front page of the newspaper for him to translate the headline. His German was very bad and Anton’s English worse, but they worked it out anyhow, repeating it back and forth to each other until they were satisfied with the results. He admired the headline mainly because the American was his friend, then asked for chewing gum.
Fiction
On Murder Island
The north wind’s been spraying Mainland Runoff in our faces for days, but that’s nothing new, nothing worth complaining about. Here on Murder Island, we have a little saying: “If ever you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes and you’ll be murdered.” Or as the Weatherman likes to say: “Radar’s telling us to brace for more hot gusty winds, Mainland Runoff, and murder.” The forecast never changes.
Fiction
Foul Weather
Some things you can’t figure out. Not even with a whole heap of scratch paper and a ribbon of data from a chattering teletype machine. Not before time runs out. And time is like progress—she’s not stopping for anybody. The answer is out there, though, in the weather.
Fiction
Chop Shop
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Fiction
At Lorn Hall
Randolph hadn’t expected the map to misrepresent the route to the motorway quite so much. The roads were considerably straighter on the page. The high beams roused swarms of shadows in the hedges and glinted on elongated warnings of bends ahead, and then the light found a signpost. It pointed down a lane to somewhere called Lorn Hall.
Fiction
Construction Project
We begin in August, when the summer nights are ripe and voluptuous. Moths beat against the window, seeking solace from the darkness. August brings violent thunderstorms; cut power lines draw the darkness closer. We cup a flickering flame and make love that brings purple bruises.
Fiction
Afterlife
Mary Hogan wrote the word Afterlife in red chalk while the children whispered. There was an urgency to their words, like spoken prayers. “Now, now. Pay attention.” Mary’s prim voice bounced against the dusty attic walls. She was forty-five years old. The time was now. The place was her mother’s townhouse in Astoria, Queens, from which she’d soon be evicted. Magic lived here. So did monsters.
Fiction
Good Fences
He thinks at first the streetlight’s back on, but of course not. It’s been dark six weeks. There are already beer bottles piled on the sidewalk every morning from the dropout teenagers who surge in whenever there’s the littlest pool of darkness they can find, and then they smoke and drink and shout all night right under his window when he’s trying to sleep.
