Fiction
Recommended
Where We Lay Our Scene
Her ticket is at will-call. She needs no help finding their seats, but Tom repeatedly cranes his neck to check the doors at the back of the hall. He likes it when she emerges from…
The Nature of Comets
We found the remains just below the embankment of an antediluvian oxbow. She had been lying there a long time, before the Cayuse and Lewis and Clark and the Grand Coulee Dam and long before…
Sister Love
“You’re acting like a child,” said Karen. “I’m not,” said Lynn, and looked with determination at her dinner plate. She could feel Karen’s anger vibrating against her skin. “Oh, don’t talk to me—” Lynn glanced…
Follow Me, Boys
The station hall echoed with the rumble of waiting buses every time the door opened. The restroom door squeaked. A mother on the far row of chairs scolded her child—“Don’t climb on that!”—as her breasts…
Drought
The reservoir was drying up, and the former townspeople of Jordan Gap came to the receding shoreline at the end of winter. They camped on the flat and stood in the mud at the edge…
Accusation
Nathan hears the accusation during bishopric meeting. “Helen Sheeney is convinced,” the bishop says. “She pulled my wife aside after homemaking meeting. Once she started in, it took nearly an hour to calm her down.…
The Buzzard Tree
Patty Lou looked out the door. She was waiting for her grandson, Robert, to come. She hadn’t seen him since her ninetieth birthday party three months earlier, when the whole family had come out to…
Charity Never
This is how I remember it. The morning before my business flight to England, our two-year old daughter, Myra, started shrieking as if a Ninja assassin had infiltrated her room. I wrapped a pillow around…
The Blessing
You never can tell what April is going to be like in Boise. Sometimes you get sunshine, sometimes you get rain, and sometimes you get blizzards that roar out of the canyons. I died in…
Entertaining Angels Unaware
Lucy hated arguing with her companion in public, even though they argued in English so most people couldn’t understand what they were saying, and those who did could probably care less. They didn’t argue often,…