Fiction

The fog hasn’t rolled in this summer evening and Charu rather enjoys the warm weather during her half-hour walk from the Berkeley Downtown BART station to the Krishna temple.

The trouble began three days ago when Tingting had stopped answering Betty’s calls, messages, then emails. For two days, before she arrived at the high school where she taught orchestra, Betty had waited outside Tingting’s pharmacy clinic.

I remember I was at the end of a long twisted phone chord in a corner of my parents’ front hall when you first asked me out the summer before we went to college. You said I’d like to take you to Houlihan’s for dinner, knowing I liked the booths in the back that were shrouded by plastic vines and noisy strands of beads.

One sees all manner of life rock up in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery. You have the red-faced teens with their embarrassing infections sat next to the bleary-eyed mammies comforting scabby-arsed babies.

In the summer of 1975, my Uncle Marvin sent for us to stay with him in Chicago by telephone. Just the girls, he’d said, leaving my brother Michael to himself in Robbins. We were ecstatic.

My mother used to say that lobsters scream when boiled, but it’s only air escaping the shell. I was seven when she first told me this, standing at her station in Cannery Building C, watching her feed crawlers into the steamer.

The man’s grey eyes, no light in them. The tug on the corners of his mouth rendering a smile impossible. Lucy had seen a look like that before.

You know Banesa Delgado walks home with you cuz she hungry—right? I mean, you the fattest freshman in North Bergen High. You think the baddest bitch in the volleyball team—and that’s a lot to say, cuz alladem bad—wanna be seen nowhere with you?

I arrive home days later than my sisters, guilty for living so far away, heart-bruised from the lack of a welcome. There is no call from my mother at an open door: Julia’s here!

Four AM. Miami-Dade County was as quiet as it would ever be until the sun winked out but still too noisy. Cruising west on 41, I half-listened to the radio to block out the tumult.

PART 1: A Period of Adjustment             Two weeks after Roger Pratt graduated from Georgetown Law School in Washington DC, he and his fiancé Joyce Johnson, drove back to their hometown of Chicago in a modest, rented van with a few boxes of clothes and other belongings. They had lived in

After Sharon’s death, shot dead on the street on her way to his place, possibly by a stray bullet, Withers lost his art. His photography exhibits, Men with Beards and Beautiful, Beautiful, Turds, had put him on the map. And now, after her murder, Pictures of Sharon. What did it matter? One solitary bullet, whether

   – circa 1950s, circa 2020s   THE PAUSE “Women. You can’t live with ’em … ” and pause, wait, hold it, little bit longer … aaaaand … that’s it. End of joke. Buddy Sego was big. Bigger than his namesake, Buddy Hackett. Bigger than Jackie Mason (and less Jewy, people would say, just not

People often disappeared from our apartment building on Manila Ave. At least that’s what Kuya Jem used to tell us. He wasn’t really our brother. That’s just what everyone in our building called him—Kuya. He did a lot of things for us and the other tenants. In the morning, he tended to the halaman planted

It was a night tailor-made for lunatics, a supermoon hanging low above the town like a giant communion wafer pinned up against the inky dark sky, the night air crisp and of a sort that made breath visible. Lyric FM and the eclectic instrumentals of Night Train filled the car, the DJ’s familiar husky drawl

My father is a learned man who teaches history in the college in Marash, a small city at the foot of the Taurus Mountains. When the government forces the school to shut down, he believes it is just the beginning. “What is next?” he demands angrily to anyone who will listen. “Surrender our books? Surrender

They took what they needed—ate until something, or someone, disturbed their meal. Resilient things. They returned—swooped down in a dark cloud on the paved podium of the little park and continued eating. Kunle sat at the bench many times, watching them in the cold dark London winter. He rarely cycled straight home from his job

Gabriel woke up early, before light. He dressed in the dark and carried his backpack down to the kitchen and dropped it on the floor by the screen door. His father had already made bacon and eggs and toast and coffee. Gabriel sat down and rubbed his eyes and waited. His father put a plate

Devon wore the boat hat—blue with Saint Augustine’s school insignia, two white oars crossed on an embroidered field of gold. Despite the ranger’s booming voice, Devon had trouble making out the words over the heads of his classmates. He couldn’t see the ranger’s lips, hear his intonations. He turned away and watched a bird land,

You left behind two racks of wall-to-wall clothes that fill a walk-in closet cavernous enough to have garaged the Jaguar you totaled after letting your insurance expire. In back hangs a pallor-dusted cocktail dress. The one you wore that palm-sweaty Sunday plotted by Cathy after I finagled her out of her most recent DUI where

Last week I promised Elisha I’d never do it again. My sleep was going to shit. My social life was going to shit. My relationship and mental health were also going to shit. Plus, I had a headache. And my body creaked as I stretched. It was nine pm. The office—a converted Victorian industrial building—was

One early evening I got punched in the head. I didn’t know, first of all, nor feel it. No preamble. No anticipation. I could have been anywhere, drinking beer, avoiding nuisance. But an unplanned decision and I get the job. I arrived, the girl in bits. I had no way to play it. She was

It was a sinkhole that took my mother-in-law, Spicy, during my Christmas visit as a new, unwelcome bride to the family home in Florida. A tiny, livid widow tanned almost mahogany, she was sunning herself in the back yard when there was a whooshing sound. She looked with irritation up at my window—as if it

You don’t fully remember. You think you were thirteen when you heard Sade screaming in the courtyard of your boarding school. Your father often drove over two hours to get you and your brother there. It was one of the best schools in Lagos City with state-of-the-art facilities. Immaculate education. You only had one year

My uncle was crazy, but that’s beside the point. The real point is that my uncle was broke. He was the kind of broke where even the people who were out for blood stopped hunting him down because they knew there was nothing more to take, he’d been stripped to the bone. The last time

When Kwame called to arrange the job interview—his voice like sea glass and not at all like the sharp-tongued recruiters who grated me with questions about long-term goals and role models—I was relieved. It had been almost a year since I graduated from school into what the headlines were calling a “jobless recovery.” My college

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

I should have known when the neighbor’s rooster came in our yard one morning and crowed long and loud that nothing was set to go well that day, a sign of trouble like the old heads liked to say. I had folded and unfolded my father’s letter looking at the few words he had scrawled

On eggshells. Bunkie scrutinizes every move I make. You left water in the sink. I get up and wipe it dry. There’s a bead of piss on the back rim of the toilet. I get up and wipe it dry. Try to get ahead of him. Start sweeping the cell. Learn a few things. Like

On a Tuesday evening in late July, Miriam and her lover Ted watched a storm roll in over the lake. They met at her dock every evening after Ted returned from visiting hours at the memory care unit. There, like a loyal goose, he had shared dinner with his wife, who spoke to him in

“Don’t be messin with my hustle, now,” Sandra says, her voice rough as a gravel path. We’re drilling our way down Broadway and Sandra adds, “I’m gonna push these motherfuckers into the street if they don’t get outta my way.” Nearby, a woman, long blond hair, young, wearing leggings, swoops in front of us, pushing

It started innocently enough—letter here, a word there—and he reasoned that Mrs. Pookutty needed the help, her English-in-retirement simply having acquired some rust since her School-Principal heyday. She probably meant to use the right word all along, the one Prabhakar had just typed. “The unexploded ordnance just lay thier, partially buried in the sand –

She used to be a nurse. At our old house, I watched her get ready each morning. She began with pulling up white pantyhose. She never wore underwear which made me think I shouldn’t either. “You have to!” she said. “You don’t have a choice.” At our new house, Mom wears underwear. Her nursing uniforms

The two Travelers, both women, one older, one young, together in a pickup with a camper shell where they sometimes slept. They drove the rural and snow-spackled Dakotas towards the horizon on a wintry afternoon across flat farmland blanketed in snow under the threat of more weather. “Nana, those are mountains.” “Serena, those are clouds.”

Pomegranate by the acclaimed author Helen Elaine Lee is one of the most significant novels of the last decade. It has received glowing reviews, and it was recently chosen by Amazon’s editors as one of the Best Books of the Year So Far, at #6. How challenging it is to write with compassion on each page,

We’d gotten hung up an extra half-day and which made us late retrieving the body. Us meaning me, and my half-brother Harlan who’d recently turned seventeen. I was three years older, and the house, for better or worse, fell to us. As did our dad’s hard-used, one-ton Chevy flatbed with the homemade driver’s side running

Key West, Florida April 1955   In the evenings, she and Tenn took the trolley to Mallory Square. He carried the lounge chairs and a thermos of gin martinis, shaken by the rutted road. Carson carried, as ever, her desire to see the world, to be seen. By the world. Tenn joked with fellow passengers

Russell’s Knob, New Jersey 1866 Duncan Smoot received reliable word that there were a few remaining people at the old plantation on Kenworthy Island. They were said to be too frail to leave, were living in hovels on the place. The Kenworthy were long gone. And though they’d taken the island, the Union Army was

“I need you at the meeting tonight,” Van says. They drive through the entrance to the once luxurious golf course. A developer plans to convert the fairways and greens into housing. “I wonder what score I would have to shoot to block the sale,” Nick says. His tone is solemn. He knows such faith in

Any moment can change your life in ways you would never have anticipated. For me, it was the time I went to the rivermen. I’d gone to rid myself of my “illness,” that hefty sack of burdens that was about to sink me to the depth of despair forever. The visit to the river had

She was a package delivery woman. She took her job seriously; almost every package was a birth. A birth of something new replacing something old, or a new idea, or the beginning of a determination, or a future. Unless it was food; food was just food, in different shapes, types of desirability, difficulties of cooking

In Sayulita, the spaces are small. Nicole passes stores and cafés that would serve as closets where she’s from, and no one apologizes for not having a bathroom, simply wagging their heads, “Aquí, no,” and gesturing at some unnamed place. At night, overpacked bars spill out into the street, upsetting the flow of traffic and

Twenty Stories: New and Selected by Jack Driscoll is the winner of Pushcart’s Editors Book Awards, and it is easy to see why this collection is already garnering praise and prizes. Jack Driscoll is a master of the short story (although that is not all he writes) and these twenty tales underscore his accomplishment. Here

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

In the mountains below Vladikavkaz, Johnny’s father splits bricks. One by one with a hammer. On the other side of the POW camp, the shards are shattered into gravel. The gravel is packed into crates, then sent in trains to be churned elsewhere into concrete. The concrete is then piped politely into bricks. The blue

“I am littoraly fucked,” I think, standing ankle deep in the Atlantic at low tide in a thick fog, not knowing which way shore lies. Not a time for word play perhaps, but I am not yet aware of the gravity of my plight. I am maybe a half a mile from… from what? From

When my mom stood on her seat in front of the entire school and made a show of bowing at me after my performance, I swallowed back the urge to laugh. On some level, I knew she was performing as much from the audience as I was from the stage. I had put on an

Robert and those who survive the following summer will ask themselves: Did that election season really happen when they were children? Are they re-writing the past to cut the pain? Then their collective trauma unclenches. That summer of romance and air conditioning happened, they assure each other, especially ones that fled North and gather at

Alice clicks off the radio on her desk. Her now-silent office on the 12th floor of an Art Deco skyscraper on Dearborn is mercilessly air conditioned, but beyond the plate glass of her windows, she knows the city is sweltering through another white-skied August afternoon. She cannot listen to the news on public radio any

“Wait, what’s that you’re making for supper, father?” Ellen asked upon bursting into the kitchen from the mudroom, sniffing at the air like some feral creature, forgoing any prefatory niceties. Like, Hello. “Halibut au poivre,” I answered, because I figured the French might throw her off a bit, and because that’s what I was making.

A WORLD lit up by the glint of snow. They drove the long drive in, up the steadily sloping hill, winding for no good reason around sweeping curves carved into the vast and open grounds. Pete Connerly drove and hummed along with the radio, finger-tapping the steering-wheel to the beat. Del Connerly imagined the view

There was no compound wall around the construction site, no watchman to tell the two girls they could not enter. Holding hands, they scurried behind an idle cement mixer and crouched low. Book bags rustled, tiffin carriers squeaked. Four eyes tracked skyward along the building’s length. Ten stories. A proper high rise, the township’s first.

Mid-June, shimmering heat. First date. Roy’s: her choice. Daisy ordered roast chicken; Ben ordered a whole trout. “One of the most underrated fish,” he declared. After two bites, he asked for her fork and loaded up a mouthful after deftly sifting out the bones. “You have to try this.” “I don’t eat fish,” Daisy said,

 My aunt was coming for a visit. We were about to be neighbors, in fact. It was the summer she’d been released from prison. Chloe’s parole officer had found her an apartment not far from us in Inwood and a job too, answering phones at a law firm. This must have been 2005. Martha Stewart

Sahdëv was twelve when he met his first Foreign Man. He entered Chirag Ali Street, humming under his breath, nursing the straps of his backpack, and saw him sitting on the milestone that was locally called Sanam Bewafa, Unfaithful Beloved, after the Salman Khan film: it read Delhi 793 even when the road didn’t take

  Former Fantasticks At silent 6AM, by the dawn’s early laptop light, I find them again: our stars. Onscreen, online– two fellow Thespians; two former Fantasticks. Blasts from my past. A boy and girl, then. And see, I’d loved, in my tortured teen way, both of them. I feel my fingers shake. Even now, in

She watched as the jury came in, watched with that dream detachment that sometimes comes to people when they are in the midst of life-changing moments whether they know it or not. She watched them take their seats, and in what almost seemed a rehearsed way, they all wore the same bland emotionless expression, if

This is a Mexican re-imagining of Rebecca. “Men are simpler than you imagine, my sweet child. But what goes on in the twisted, tortuous minds of women would baffle anyone.” Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca   The morning of the funeral, I circled my childhood bedroom in a terry cloth robe. Pacing between the closet and

As the choir brings the psalm to life, Fr. Daniel taps one finger on the armrest, in time to the beat of his own impatience. Seeing Samuel squirm in Stacy’s arms, and seeing Stacy rock him, ever so slightly, and seeing Joseph tap his fingers and shift his feet and adjust his tie and look

LYNN People without an app need a map, and Lynn just gave away her last map. Its legend shows a hotdog for a restaurant and a bed for a hotel. The map was in her glove box where she’d never in her life kept a glove. She’d gone to Valley Hardware, intent on buying what

Reflections of the ceiling fan were captured in the shattered glass beneath the window frame. Dad was in the middle of the room holding a saucer identical to the one he’d just thrown on the floor. Mom was barely inside the doorframe, her legs were spread wide. She looked domineering, even though she was without

We bought a house in Colorado. The tow truck came with the house. We bought the house to celebrate our second anniversary and because my sister, who lives in Colorado Springs, wouldn’t stop nagging on us, once the notion of a second place was mooted, to get something close to her. And yes, because the

(Summer) In June your mother asks for the ornaments. Your brother is at work and your fat sister is useless, so you bring the boxes down from the attic. There are more than a hundred of them. Colorful balls, Hallmark Snoopys, and gluey nursery school popsicle trees hang together with invisible threads. Sweating profusely, you

We didn’t own any luxury items the way normal families invested in golden or silver teaspoons, watches and jewelry. Well, there was mom’s silver teaspoon set, but it disappeared very early in the game, practically in the first weeks of the crisis. This was the official name for the time after the fall of the

I am a man. Or so I’m told. I am a woman too; people have told me that as well. I often tell myself I’m neither, but I don’t find many people inclined to agree. Either/or is fine (I’m told) but neither just won’t do. “You have a lovely baby boy,” said the doctor to

Same old story, Gen spits. But no, really, this is serious. And seriously, it is all about the setup, your perfect send-off. Clasp the leather cuff and wind the silver bracelets onto his wrist, hand him the other necklace with the big cross (the one with the diamonds on it), make sure he’s got that

Quinn and her new gang, at the far end of the table from Danette, were flashing their pearly whites at each other during lunch period on Wednesday afternoon. Playing “Who-Would-Play-You-in-the-Movie-Version-of-Your-Life?” Danette and Quinn used to while away the hours together playing this game, just the two of them. It was Danette’s invention and her absolute

Chapter 3   Boris Come one, come all!  Step on up to the House of Wonders!  Inside you will encounter varieties of humanity you have never seen!  See the one-armed juggler!  See the Dog Boy, a child with the vocal cords of a dog and the brains of a human.  See him communicate his thoughts

After today, they may say that I lived as I died: twice. Some superficial people might think just because I died once should mean I couldn’t live twice. Or just because I lived twice should mean I was born twice. None could be further from the truth. Let’s be square and say I was born