Browse Sections
Fiction
Never And Nowhere
You leave Kentucky, with its leaning phone booths and thick green twilight and sloe-blossom bourbon and dogwood insouciance, and you head west on the bus with $984 and some roast-beef sandwiches and some bananas and a bag of trail mix and the usual doubt and the usual set of diminishing expectations.
July 1996The Air Around Me Was Hissing
I was nineteen and living with three other girls in a big house sandwiched between a linseed-oil factory and a pesticide plant. Two of the girls were nuts, and the smell of linseed oil gave me headaches.
July 1996Selected Stories
I went to a theater to see a play. In the middle of the second act, there was a pause. The actors seemed to be waiting for something. A tall man walked up to me and whispered, “You’re in the play.”
July 1996At The Window
I am standing at the bay window in our living room, watching my son walk down the street. I am Nathan Gold, son of Morris, father of Jeffrey. I am Nathan, son of Rose, husband of Jacqueline, father of Jeffrey.
June 1996Burt Osborne Rules The World
All day long, on that day in the sixth grade when my life changed forever and the world became a better place, everything had been smelling and tasting like overcooked eggs.
June 1996Early
My father called two weeks ago and told me that my dog’s health was declining. Ringo has been blind for more than a year and generally sits on the porch smelling the world pass by, oblivious to the flies that dance across his useless eyes.
May 1996The Birthday Present
The last time I’d seen Madame was right after I returned from Hazelden, a fancy drug- and alcohol-rehab center in Minnesota. It was now a year later, and my birthday, but considering the circumstances you’d think I wouldn’t have to remind her not to buy me wine.
May 1996No One Said How It Would Be
My mother’s hair turned in two weeks from chestnut, as she called it, to shocking white. “I am shocking white,” she said that morning when I came into the kitchen, awakened by the smell of toast.
April 1996Warm Regards
Three-year-old Jersey Lem leaned forward and rested his chin on his tan, plump forearms, which bridged the handlebars of his tricycle. There was an invisible force field that ran between the last square of concrete sidewalk and the driveway of the house next door.
April 1996Selected Stories
I was having sex with a man, and I became frightened. So I got out of bed and covered him with potato chips.
March 1996
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today