Perhaps she should have known that she would find her lost love—her Viking husband, gone these many years—in Sydesgaard, on the island of Funen, in the village of his people.…
The exhibit had been up for three weeks when the trouble started. As soon as Cliff arrived at the gallery that afternoon, Georgina got up from the stool where they…
Getting past the mastodon took planning. The great plated skull was wedged between the fireplace and the credenza, leaving the two ivory tusks splayed across the carpet where a coffee…
The first time she flies home for the holidays, Iris makes two friends. She is seated between a married couple, because the woman prefers the window and the man prefers…
The old window gave a grand view of Yellow Tree, trunk to branch. They called it Yellow Tree even though the ginkgo was yellow for only about a week each…
The child is scared. Shrieking. She cannot get down. The child is four, in a whorl of terror. The mother is livid. Screaming. She thinks the child is weak, girly,…
Miranda was tall and as dark-haired as they come. I say was and not is and that is inaccurate because she is still around and I really am not. She…
Harold Jamieson, once chief engineer of New York City’s sanitation department, enjoyed retirement. He knew from his small circle of friends that some didn’t, so he considered himself lucky. He…
It is 1924. Günter Zeitz is thirty-three years old. His hair is black, unruly. And, in the manner of certain very tall men, he habitually hunches his shoulders and lets…
As promised in the email she’d received, the shuttle was waiting at the curb outside baggage claim. It was just a minivan, it turned out, not the wheeled and finned…
That night at the window, looking out at the street full of snow, big flakes falling through the streetlight, I listened to what Anna was saying. She was speaking of…
I was in Midtown, sitting by a dry fountain, making a list of all the men I’d slept with since my last checkup—doctor’s orders. Afterward, I would head downtown and…
I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t get up—just couldn’t get up, couldn’t get up or leave. All day lying in that median, unable. Was this misery or joy? It’s happened to…
On a November Saturday in 1990, Pam went over to Joe’s place to listen to records. It was raining in sheets that whipped around the corners of buildings and blowing…
The Gersons were a fairly unexceptional family. The maid had idly observed them upon their arrival at the Hotel Neversink as she vacuumed the length of the third-floor hallway. The…
“Thank you for the honor. I am very—honored.” You have been instructed to remove the clumsy black mortarboard at this point in the commencement ceremony. Now you incline your head…
All his life he lived on hatred. He was a solitary man who hoarded gloom. At night a thick smell filled his bachelor’s room on the edge of the kibbutz.…
They were released. For the first time in seven years, they stood outside in the courtyard of the reeducation center. They looked across at the gate. They remembered none of…
Bianca White, dressed in cream, was the first to arrive. All morning, she’d been looking forward to her lunch date with Ainsley Burton. In addition to being Bianca’s estranged best…
Years ago, Ellie asked me to write the story of our friend Addie and the chili. The incident involved some bowls of chili, and more than one woman crying, in…
I had finished lunch when I decided to attend the memorial service later that afternoon for Juno Wasserman, who had died the week before, just shy of seventy. Juno had been…
Her bathroom was a wreck. This tiny, ruinous space. The contractor had tiled the walls askew and had to start over. He’d set the tub askew and had to start…
The few white boys in our town could ball. Breakaway layups, nothing-but-the-bottom-of-the-net free throws, buzzer-beater fadeaways. They slept with basketballs in their beds and told us about their dreams. We…
After Bonin liberated the Scots’ pelts, we rode the lower trail until we come to a ford in the river where the Frenchman run his ferry. But the barge was…
Today I did something and I have no idea why I did it. I followed someone, two people actually, but it was the woman I was really following, the man…
His wife had worked at jigsaw puzzles like he imagined beavers worked at logs. If you were a beaver and you worked at logs, you probably had a saying or…
He had wanted to make sure she wouldn’t write about him, but he knew he couldn’t ask her outright not to write about him, since he was sure such a…