The morning of Claire's funeral, I lie naked on the table and wait for her mourners to arrive. Thomas scrapes a knife against whetstone in the kitchen. When he appears above me, the blade glints …

Charles looked at himself in the rearview mirror and saw that his eyes were no longer red--there was that at least. He wished that he had taken the shower offered to him at Lionel's place, because he …

On the day we found Mrs. Lovász, I didn't kill myself. Which is a funny thing to say--finding Mrs. Lovász. We knew where she was. She was only dead, not missing.

His skin was peeled in so many places, you can’t recognize the color of his hair, but when you view the rest of the tufts on his forehead, one could say it was just normal brown…He was ancient, …

It’s late on a Saturday night and Metalhead is at some kid’s basement party. The kid got the new Slayer album that afternoon and has it blaring because his parents are not home. Rockgod holds …

Curtis Smith watched from across the street as the boy argued with Lena Johnson in front of the movie theater. She had probably bought tickets for the wrong movie. Or maybe Andre didn’t want to see …

That their hair was that flat black painted on the inside of a mirror—that’s what I remember most about those boys. And that their eyes were always turned down. You could never see their color, …

As they put me to sleep, my mouth fills with the dust of the moon. I expect to choke on the silt but instead it slides in and out, and in and out, and I am, impossibly, breathing. I have dreamt …

I like your stomach hair, I told him, and he frowned down at me, confused, curious. Then he smiled, a slack-jawed smile. I braided them, the hairs, wild wiry things, pale like the goose-necked lamp …

The first one, a visitor from out of town, slipped on a mossy rock and fell 10,000 feet into the gorge’s open mouth. Then Marcy Eldritch, a week from her thirteenth birthday, leaned too far out a …

My second husband once walked into the house by the lake, carrying a very large basket of beets. They were freshly picked, dusty with dirt. I said, What is that. He said, These are beets. I said, Why …

It’s following us, pull over, my husband says, to which I say, It’s dark, to which he says, Please, Ellie, let’s not fight over this one, and so I pull to the side of the road. Lo and behold, …

Cheese melts in London like nowhere else. Old mixes with new like nowhere else. The city is blessed. But a girl can sob her heart out in London's streets and no one will stop, no one will raise an …

A bird flew into the window. To me its wingspan seemed enormous. I ran out into the garden and on the path lay a large woodpecker. His beak was half open. The woodpecker was having trouble breathing. …

On top of the water, the sky rippled thinly. Lake Macatawa was clear and cold that fall. My paddle cut through the surface, carving circles that spread outward, overlapping as they went. Eddies …

He leaves a note for her on the kitchen table. She's just spent the week in San Francisco with her mother, and the moment she walks in with her luggage, sweating, she sees the note pinned down by her …

My father beat me with a lot of different things, but the thing I remember best was the hairdryer. My father loved that hair dryer. He used it every day. He had beautiful, flowing hair, much longer …

Margaret and Kennar kicked back a lot with the other thirteen couples after their day's work was done: his, out on the massive Ghawar oil field; hers, folding laundry and wringing diapers and …

Begin at end, at the beginning of a real winter, in the barn, up in the hayloft, alone. In Woods, Kansas, standing in the hayloft door, looking out across the bare December fields. Wrapped in a …

GUILLERMO COTTO-THORNER was born in Puerto Rico in 1916 and migrated to New York City in 1938. In addition to publishing two novels, Manhattan Tropics (1951) and Gambeta (1971), Cotto-Thorner was a …