Category Archive Browsing Category: Friday Fictioneers

I was in town and arranged to meet him for tea. He looked older. We all did. He rose to shake my hand. “Haven’t seen you since Toyko,” he said with a trace of a smile. I’d been one of those tasked with the delivery system. His job was the chemistry, Others in the group…

Her mittened hand felt small and cold in his.  Even though the wool hat hid her face he knew she was crying. “Two more times around, honey,” he said, voice almost obscenely cheerful. “Then we can go get some cocoa.” Twice more they made their laborious way around, her ankles splaying birdlike despite the heavy…

She folded the funeral shawl and set it between sheets of peeled cedar to protect the peerless black cashmere from moths, She thought how the smell of cedar had come to mingle in her mind with the tastes of loss and grief. Her brother, her mother, her husband, and now David. From the freezer she…

The arboretum was his gift to her, a sanctuary from the life-crushing city beneath. “You deserve Utopia,” knowing full well she had not read, in fact would never read, the book for which such impossible places are named. So it was not surprising she took it for granted, as she had the fox cubs, the…

We’d bought the Caravan two years before Clark was supposed to retire. “We’ll finally get to see this great country of ours,” we told each other. Three months before the big day, Clark was summoned to an office where sat his new supervisor, a Harvard MBA who’d been part of the team that had come…

The Lord said to the Adversary, “Where have you been?” The Adversary answered the Lord, “I have been roaming all over the earth.” -Job 1:7 Sol got up from his desk and walked to the chessboard in the corner of his cluttered office. He enjoyed playing chess by mail, having the time to consider all…

Tom stepped onto the Hoboken Pier weak-kneed and sick, the ten-day trip from LeHavre stretched to fourteen by the unrelenting Atlantic weather. Two years before on this same jetty, his life had been full. He’d had patriotism and the backing of his family, a home to return to, a just cause to fight and maybe…

“You know that scene in Papillon where Steve McQueen is locked in a pit for five years?” he said once. “I’d be fine with that.” She’d smiled at what she thought was a joke. Years later, when the kids had fled to families of their own and they both retired, they’d sold the house and…

The mirror again. A necessary evil, though it ceased being kind years ago. Jens once had had the gall to call her vain, a case of the pot and the kettle if ever there was one. Jens, the preening peacock, crucified between his hairline and his waistline. She leaned in, concentrated on drawing a tight…