"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure. I'm 43. I'm sure."

"It's a big decision. It's a life."

"Don't you think I know that? I'm Catholic. I know what a life is."

"I should have worn

She had death in her hands, in her heart, in the americ tang of her angry sweat: she was jealous of a piece of bread. It was a dark, trunk-thick loaf of Polish bread, and Agnes could think of

I.

Deirdre doesn't talk to Nicole anymore, but she thinks she does. Last winter, six months went by with neither one of them saying anything. Right around Memorial Day, Deirdre asked if she

Kitty peeled dead flies off the screen. She squinted in the direction of the boatyard. "No boats today," she muttered to herself.

A late season heat wave had brought a constant haze that made

Leonard Crank is an ass. He's a beer-in-a-can-drinking, White-Owl-cigar-smoking, wife-beater-wearing, greasy-haired slug. He is also my next-door neighbor. As for me, well, I have always been the

"Rita, I know you've slept with one of your cousins," Mom told me this morning at brunch.

My stomach kicked. I stopped chewing but couldn't swallow.

"Here, drink some juice," she said and

He sits in his chair, absently running his fingers through his thinning white hair. She hunches on the sofa, quivering, holding a shredded tissue in one hand and rubbing warmth into her forearm

1

My father’s ashes clumped on the way to Smith Mountain Lake—it was probably the humidity. We had transferred his ashes from the urn because my mother thought the urn was ostentatious. We had

Dina stood on the edge of the platform. She liked to feel the rush of the subway as it roared past. It was midnight. She was coming from a movie about a woman who liked to photograph strangers.

Mark took a pencil out of his royal blue gym bag. He hunted for a scrap of notebook paper, something to write on, but all he could find was a half-eaten tuna fish and potato chip sandwich, a

The man wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief embroidered with his initials ($75.- a piece). He had just finished his meal of raw sea scallop carpaccio drizzled with white truffle oil and

I. The Way There
 

On the way there you notice the light again, the same light you’ve noticed ever since you got here, a light that seems stronger than light you’ve seen elsewhere, as though

Sometimes there is a freight train stopped on the tracks. The tracks split the town, dividing it into one half and the other. On the one side, there is school. On the other, there is the little

Thurleen’s feet hurt. And her head hurt from Parmalee’s algebra homework. Her eyes hurt because she didn’t have the money to replace her glasses. Her heart hurt because Roy never said the three

My current employer, The Wor(l)d Economist, sent me on assignment to interview Gandhi’s grandson, who was in exile on an unchartered island near Fiji. I was in a BarbaryTM skiff with a maniacal

There was a bump on his head, and that’s what made him crazy. That’s the story he tells whenever anyone asks about it, the Doctors, the Police, the Park People, the Guy Who Sort of Looked Like

The boy wore a powder blue tuxedo and he tap danced around the house in shiny shoes. He wiggled the long tail of his fancy suit. When a stranger, a soon-to-be-new-relative took his picture, he hid

When Isabel Araya was born in the southern tip of the pampas, twenty-one years, three months, and seven days before she would hold Juan Diego’s warm hand in the candlelight of the church, the

Ernie peered over the dash with a cigarette in his left hand and a can of spiked Pepsi in his right, fingertips grazing the ribbed underbelly of the wheel as he steered. He and Blume were on the

Andrew peeped out the window and noted that the end of the world, astoundingly, was small as a bee. 

"When's the last time you looked outside," he asked Julie, spread like Orion on the rug with