The man was walking in the middle of the road. He stumbled, fell to his knees, and then stood up again, swaying slightly as he found his balance.

She was hidden, she was private, she was like one of those little Russian eggs, infinitely ornate inside. It was her egotism. He’d found it.

Toward the end of last summer, when I was combating a bout of loneliness after the death of my wife, a new neighbor moved in next door. He arrived at number 16—I’m number 14—late one night. 

You’d best not come right now. Alonzo is terribly excited about Theodore Roosevelt. He stays at the newspaper until all hours of the night. 

“I said, you know, thank goodness it’s not autism,” Jenny said, so exuberantly that it took Marion a moment to register the joke.

She asks how much farther it is to East Bergholt. When he tells her they won’t be there before nightfall, her face clouds over. He stares straight ahead, at the traffic that isn’t there, on this road that runs

The Temples of Juno and Concordia, brown and wrinkled like the fingers of old men, stand on the hills overlooking the village of Porto Bianco. Where the column meets the cornice, grass grows, as hair out of the noses of the old men in the village beyond. Below, half 

My great-aunt Eva had patience as if she could wait for eternity; that was why, when she died, mean and ugly and absorbed by her pain, and we buried her in the family plot in an August heat wave, everyone

I have a sister named Alice who’s only eight months older than I am. The reason for this eludes most people. My parents adopted Alice before they figured out my mother was already pregnant

Before the dawn of history, when the earth was still flat and the oceans ran out to the edges and fell off into space, back so far in time the sun had not yet risen, the world was a very dark place, so dark