Prairie Schooner

Punishment

Prairie Schooner
Spring 2011

“She told the police she couldn’t remember anything. From out of the pain and the dim apprehension that she was alive, she shook her head no. Even after she’d been stabilized and the swelling had gone down so that she could see — though her vision was blurred and the IV drip made her mind hover just out of reach — still she told them no…”


New England Review

Being and Northingness (Not a Real Title)

New England Review
Volume 30, Number 3 (2009)

“In the next room Incunabula de la Luz (not her real name) is auditioning people to be her mother. Her real mother — at least she claims to be her real mother — wanted to come to the auditions, but Luz — Lucita — said no. So this is how come I’m on the phone doing the play-by-play…”


Story Quarterly 40

Presently in Ruins

Pushcart Prize-winning story
Story Quarterly 40, 2006
About the Pushcart Prize

“The names had the sound of the History Channel: Pearl Harbor, Eniwetok Atoll, Guam. His father had been to each during the Second World War and he, the son, had never known about it. Fifty-one years he’d been alive and to find out who his father had been he had to get like this: drunk, lost, estranged from a minimum of two wives, and a murderer in the eyes of his sister, and maybe the state of Indiana…”


N|E|R

A Few Moral Problems You Might Like to Ponder, of a Winter’s Evening, in Front of the Fire, with a Cat on Your Lap

New England Review
Volume 26, Number I (2005)

“In this era of the insulted and the reeducated, you have the correct family background to be a model student. Your father was a peasant and your second elder sister was sold as a servant before Liberation. Chairman Mao is your sun and you are his sunflower. When he selects you to go to university, you denounce to your girlish heart the pride you feel…”


Kenyon Review

The Madonna of the Relics

The Kenyon Review
Autumn 2005

“He felt it most in the evenings. After a day of cleaning an archangel’s silk or the Virgin’s brocade, he would let himself get lost in the fabulous city, walking beside the canals and over the arched footbridges, torturing himself with beauty…” 


Cover of Massachusetts Review

Missing, Believed Wiped

The Massachusetts Review
Summer 2004

“It was as if he had been there, with his parents and Speedy Alka-Seltzer and his non-existent kid brother: in the den of their Levittown house, in front of the black-and-white Philco, with Ernie Kovacs and the dancing Lucky Strikes and outside the 50s happening like a mushroom cloud…”


Kenyon Review 1983

Hands

The Kenyon Review
Winter 1983

“Here in New England we sit in chairs. It’s from my porch rocker that I watch the raccoon. He usually comes at dusk, that time of day half dog and half wolf, when the downturned leaves seem to glow with the sunset and the upturned ones glimmer with moonlight…”