“There’s some guys, they should never get out. You wouldn’t want ’em out, believe me. You ever saw ’em, you’d know it.” Marty Harris said that to a group of students in a night class I’d been teaching. It was $800.00 per semester on top of my day job, which was bringing white kids from the suburbs to the city to work on educational projects with Black kids. Eleven thousand a year I got for that, plus gas. Those were the days. Or some of them, anyway. I don’t know what happened to programs like that. Maybe the people deciding they should get funded gave up. I’d asked Marty Harris to come in bec ..read more

In those days, Rt. 364 was just a muddy track through the jungles of Rondônia. Jim was on his way to Porto Velho, to catch a riverboat that would take him down the Rio Madeira to Manaus, the fabled city at the heart of the Amazon. But right then it didn’t look as if anyone would make it to Porto Velho. There had been the usual rains and the result had been the usual mud. A large truck had lost traction, slid sideways, and was blocking the only route to the interior. All traffic was stopped, but no one seemed too upset. Passengers in the bus either chatted in low tones or snored the time away ..read more

When Mom went missing late one night, my kid sister Fran got worried. She called me first thing the next morning. She and her hubby, Trip, had found her all the way down the hill at the end of the drive, trying to thumb a ride to Hope. Still in her nightgown, clutching a pillow, Mom looked like a bent-over question mark when the headlights caught her. She told them in that low, steely voice of hers that she had to get to Bill Clinton’s birthplace to deliver an important message to him. “What message is that?” asked Trip through the rolled-down window of his pickup. “That he needs to stay away ..read more

“Who likes fleece?” Holly was ferociously flipping through the pages of a Land’s End holiday catalog, a quizzical expression scrunching up her forehead. “Sheep, I’m guessing?” Jeff said. “Some humans must, too,” Holly chuckled. “Just look at the brightly colored articles of unnecessary clothing on these over-smiling, cartoonlike people, all ensconced in fleece.” They were sitting on the couch, killing time before the next round of pandemic-imposed cleaning, cooking, or Zooming. “Who are these people?” said Jeff. “Do we know anyone who wears this stuff? And if so, can we convince them to keep t ..read more

-1- One week after the fire claimed her grown son and English setter, her horses and wagons, her rifles and ledgers, her personal library, her precisely calibrated lab instruments and voluminous notebooks in which she’d recorded her secret chemical formulae, Hilda Whitby stood with her back to the riverbank and surveyed for a final time the scorched two-acre parcel where the house, barn, and lumber mill once stood. Despite the warm weather, she wore a heavy cotton dress that reached to her ankles, one of the few garments that had survived the explosion and the one she wore to the funeral held ..read more

Hugh McCarthy had just turned fifty-five when his crippled mother died, leaving him alone in the world. News of her death spread quickly throughout the stately condominium complex, where residents had watched him wheel her about in her wheelchair for almost half a century, and among his customers at the local pharmacy, where he had counted pills and dispensed advice since graduating from pharmacy school thirty years earlier. Suddenly, several matronly divorcees and widows stopped to look him over, their eyebrows arched inquisitively as they offered their condolences in the lobby or waited for ..read more

“…He asked Aunt Ruth’s forgiveness for what he did to Larry many times. Though he didn’t respond to my questions, his repeated pleas for forgiveness confirmed my worst suspicions. My Uncle Mert was a murderer…” “…There are many things that I hate about living in a small town. There are whispers and secrets galore but when one attempts to confront the truth, he often meets an impenetrable wall, a conspiracy of silence…” Aunt Ruth passed away a couple of years ago. Otherwise, she’d have gone through Uncle Mert’s stuff and put it all in corrugated boxes to give to the Salvation Army, something th ..read more

By the beginning of fall, we had agreed that Jody would be the one to die this time. We’d all seen it in his shaking hands and sallow skin and stuttered speech — the drugs. And so, because we had already decided it would be Jody who was going to die, no one stepped forward to help him in the graduate student breakroom when he cracked open the plastic container, took out the last snickerdoodle cookie, brought it to his mouth, and started to choke. We were listening to Lily telling a story about how Carmen had gone to Seattle for a conference where she also visited Prof. Tanner, who was on sabba ..read more

Author Terry Gimble bolted upright awake in his plane seat like a rocket. He had been dozing, dreaming that his publisher, In-MEDIAS-Res (IMSR), found out that he had plagiarized his second novel, Country Knights. Gimble was sweating as he looked about. Had I cried out in my sleep? During his six-hour flight from the Midwest to Seattle (albeit in first class on IMSR’s dime), Gimble had downed every vodka screwdriver proffered by the attendants, but he was unable to erase the emailed message he received shortly after the release of his new novel. It was from Eddie Frist, a high school classmate ..read more

Catskills — a treasure chest for antiquing. Cozy back roads, like a dead end with a mysterious dark-green pond at the end, tall grass. Around the corner, all of a sudden, a snowmobile with a big headless doll sitting on the front seat, a dilapidated barn. Then more barns and sheds with a mishmash of rusty tools, cracked frames, pilgrims’ brass utensils, empty chessboards. Marina knew the owner, named Dick. He was sitting in a small building that looked more like a small family house than a toolshed. Downstairs behind the unfinished desk, there was a dusty phone next to him, amidst half-broken ..read more