The rain rattled on to the single-glazed skylight that stretched part-way across the barge’s roof. Above the glass, greyness pervaded the grim lower atmosphere of North London, and if we moved down through it, we’d have been able to see two men engaged in deep conversation. One of them was irate, the other appeared incredibly [...]
Peter Morton woke with a start to face the first light. Rain tapped against the glass. It was January the fifth.
He looked across a table on which a night-light had guttered into a pool of water, at the other bed. Francis Morton was still asleep, and Peter lay down again with his eyes on his [...]
It was beyond her control. What did she think she could do, a thirty-seven year old woman with no training? As she zipped along the Bronx River Parkway the scattered litter and the graffiti splattering the retaining walls and once graceful stone bridges kept drawing her eyes away from the road.
Jan brushed her long brown [...]
The three of us, Dan, Tanya and me, sat in Dan’s cubicle, plotting how to take over the department. We were sick of the bullshit. We were sick of Morgan, the editorial director, all her stupid procedures, so we were going to take over the department by force. Dan wanted to use box cutters and [...]
”Hi, love.”
“Lee,” she started, “you’re not dressed yet?”
“What for?”
The door shut behind Elsa and framed her disbelief like a painting. “Lee, I told you. We’re going out to dinner with Henry, Jen and Gracielle.”
“Oh,” he looked up at her. “That tonight?”
“Yes, that’s tonight.”
“Huh. Didn’t know that was tonight.” His eyes fell back upon the magazine [...]
The living room was dark, save for a triangle of pale green light. Audrey’s glow-in-the-dark panties. They seemed to float across the room, past Ken, who watched from the couch. He held his breath, trying not to make a sound. The panties moved into the kitchen, and a moment later he heard the refrigerator door [...]
Meggie wasn’t always a ghost. I first knew her as a frequenter of my local coffee shop and I often saw her chatting away to her girlfriends, of whom she seemed to have an endless supply, all of them just like her – in their early twenties, fashionably dressed and pretty in that unsurprising way [...]
Upon returning a book late, the librarian explains to me, “To forget a book is forgivable, but to forget the words is a travesty.” It is overdue because I didn’t finish reading it within three weeks. Seems like a good excuse. Of course when I hand her the book a month late, I still haven’t [...]
ONE DOLLAR AND EIGHTY-SEVEN CENTS. THAT WAS ALL. AND SIXTY CENTS of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. [...]
I shall never forget the experience of landing my first real job and fending for myself as I crossed a significant boundary. An old clunker was packed down and conveyed my essential belongings to an apartment I had found while browsing the rental section of a local newspaper of my recently established hometown. The decision [...]
