Work
Wedding Night
“I’m seventeen years old, sitting with Randy Osterman on his picnic bench. He’s got his dad’s binoculars trained on the bride, but I’m watching the couple in the gazebo stare out across the lake and garden. You can tell they’re talking about the wedding, how expensive and lovely and delicious, what an unusual location. She hands him her champagne glass so she can reach her hand under the hem of her bright pink dress and fix her slip.
Painted Ocean, Painted Ship
The Best American Short Stories 2010 →
“ What she hadn’t been able to describe really to anyone about that day in Tumby Bay was the sublimity, the blinding beauty of that bird as it flew, and as it lay where it fell. She could bring back in an instant that moment of white light rising beyond the leaves, her hand shaking against the gun. The echo of the shot seeming to come first because her ears went dead, then the load roar as they woke again. The flapping and cracking as something fell down through the trees, branch by snapping branch.
The Disappearance of Miranda Željko
“Personally, I’d come to the think of Miranda Željko as the model of local success. Someone who lost it all, who lived in the same drafty apartment as us, who shook off her Virginia accent and conquered the town. I believed she was tiny, with dancer’s legs, and she cut her dark hair short the day after the divorce. When she was lonely, she drank tea and watched The Apartment again and again, just to see the part with the tennis racket and the spaghetti.”
