fiction
Posts filed under fiction.
The sun set below the horizon
The sun set below the horizon, and the sky turned a deep shade of purple. The stars began to appear, and the world was bathed in a soft, silvery light.…
Were you in love with her?
The question is in a way meaningless, she knows, but one must ask. Love in such situations is rarely real. Sex is the engine, exalting and ruining people, sex and…
Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know
You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook;
In the hospital men’s room
In the hospital men’s room, as I’m washing my hands, I glance in the mirror. The man I see is not so much me as my father. When did he…
On foot, from necessity or in deference
On foot, from necessity or in deference to his dismounted commander or associates, his conduct was the same. He would stand like a rock in the open when officers and…
He once thought it himself, that he might die
He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm.…
You must thrive in spite of yourself
You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
Looking back on those incidents,
always appalled by the memory of his passivity, hard though it was to see what else he could have done. He could have refused to pay for the gravy damage…
In the days to follow the hacendado would
come up to the corral where they’d shaped the manada and he and John Grady would walk among the mares and John Grady would argue their points and the hacendado…