The Brother Grober decided to stop for a moment to take up strength, and pulling strongly on the hand brake, brought the old Packard to quivering rest beside a jagged little mesquite bush. Looking vacantly about him, he noted that in the fields scattered white heads of cotton, missed by the mechanical picker, hung broken-necked down their stalks, sprayed with black mud and wagging sadly in the breeze; it all should have been taken up and burned against the bollweevil, but the land no doubt belonged to Spurgis since was house stood up at the end of the road, and poor Spurgis was sick.

Some Saturdays the two white men did not hunt, but would sit nearly motionless on the front porch of the little lodge, with the bourbon and the bucket of ice cubes between them on the floor, staring somberly off toward the rows of houses which had crept out from the city to menace their land. 

The first letter arrived on the same day I found the body. It was addressed to her so I didn’t open it. Not immediately. I put it on the mantelpiece. 

Ivan Pomorenko sat on a dry hummock near the mosquito-netted entrance to the bunker. Earlier he heard heavy vehicles moving, probably German, and assumed that they were building a temporary road

Disclaimer: Nothing in this story is true. All of the characters in this story are products of the writer’s imagination. Any likeness of these characters and the situation described herein to those in real life are purely coincidental.

I used to write stories that had lakes, that had deep blue waters shelled by the sky; water mucky and full of disease; I wrote stories where people used to break down and cry unbidden, unprovoked, just because of the way a stone looked when it was wet, or the way the wind ruffled the grass;

Day after day I went through the ­paternal motions, testing my son while he tested me, trying to teach him not only to do what I said, which seems like a given, but also to see and taste the world in certain ways, with an ideal in mind, a purified vision of the best way to live reduced to a rudimentary, five-year-old version: good eye contact with others, a sustained gaze, not just looking, but giving an indication of having seen—a head nod—and maintained long enough to show respect and not too much fear.

They called her the Witch, the same as her mother; the Girl Witch when she first started trading in curses and cures, and then, when she wound up alone, the year of the landslide, simply the Witch. If she’d had another name, scrawled on some timeworn, worm-eaten piece of paper maybe, buried at the back of one of those wardrobes that the older crone crammed full of plastic bags and filthy rags, locks of hair, bones, rotten leftovers, if at some point she’d been given a first name and last name like everyone else in town, well, no one had ever known it, not even the women who visited the house each Friday had ever heard her called anything else. She’d always been you, retard, or you, asshole, or you, devil child, if ever the mother wanted her to come, or to be quiet, or even just to sit still under the table so that she could listen to the women’s maudlin pleas, their sniveling tales of woe, their strife, the aches and pains, their dreams of dead relatives and the spats between those still alive, and money, it was almost always the money, but also their husbands and those whores from the highway, and why do they always walk out on me just when I’ve got my hopes up, they’d sob, what was the point of it all, they’d moan

Each day I walk to the Polo Club while my wife is at work and my children at school. I have my lunch at the club, a little wine, and I walk home. I don’t work anymore; I worked long enough, and very hard.

On a hazy summer afternoon in Los Angeles, while my wife was at work and our children were napping, I answered the ringing doorbell to find my grandmother, two months dead, standing