Fiction

He seemed uncomfortable as he stood in the cab gangway. Sometimes he absently watched my mate, Jack Regan, handling the controls of the locomotive. But mostly he stared thoughtfully at the edge of the permanent-way running swiftly beside our train; ...

Fragment of Voss, a novel. So the party entered the approaches to hell, with no sound but that of horses passing through a desert, and saltbush grating in a wind. This devilish country, flat at first, soon broke up into ...

I walked up Castle Street, a fat man in sandals, at two in the afternoon. The engines in the station yard sighed and shunted behind me like hot asthmatic bisons. A raiding gull riding high on the harbour wind crossed ...

Christ has risen.  — True he has risen. That was the greeting between Gianni and myself. It was Easter Sunday and I went to see him. Important day. Festival of love and hope. May it be an auspicious day. In ...

Someone pressed a button and the whirring and fangling of the power shears broke the comparative quiet of the truck shop. For a few minutes the noise filled the long narrow building, then the big wheels slowed and it was ...

The child was afraid. She sat beside the creek casting pebbles one after another into the stream. —If I can hit that log it mightn’t happen, she said to herself. Maybe in ten throws I can hit the log. Six, ...

The city was asleep on its right side and shaking with violent nightmares. Long puffs of snoring came out of the chimneys. Its feet were sticking out because the clouds did not cover it altogether. There was a hole in ...

Now what does the clock show? Only three! Still two hours of it! Two hours that are like a hill you have to climb over with a ton on your back. Don’t let the hours be piled into a hill—let ...

Ever hear how I bowled Victor Trumper for a duck ? he asked. —No, I said. —He was a beautiful bat, he said. He had wrists like steel and he moved like a panther. The ball sped from his bat ...

Blake Dempsey had come home. Not with bands playing and banners flying as befitted a hero, but silently, secretly, as he’d slipped away nearly fifteen years before, like a shadow out of the dusk. Fifteen years! It seemed incredible, sitting ...