Fiction

When our father died, there was a group email. The five of us on one long chain, subject line: Dad’s obituary. Someone suggested I write it, on the grounds that I was the lawyer, and the one who wrote things. I did what was asked. I sketched the outline of a life—dates, jobs, the usual virtues—then sent it round for comments.

New Hampshire has the largest Irish American population of any U.S. state. Irish Americans are a perennially aggrieved and mediocre people; they love to drink, and they gravitate toward New Hampshire, perhaps partially because the state motto, “live free or die,” appeals to their sense of responsibility.

I can’t tell if the apartment really is as empty and cold as it seems, or if I’m just irreparably lonely. The man from the leasing office and I stand here together, both wishing we were elsewhere.

“It’s a decent size,” I proclaim, just to say something. I can hear the blood pooling in and out of my brain.

For as bad as Dad got, he never drank out of cans.

Bottles, not cans. Bottles by the six-pack, then the twelve-pack. In a single weekend he’d make two trips to Burley’s, that brick cube with no windows sitting between the auto parts lot and a caved-in barn, and come home with two twelve-packs, buying only what he could carry inside in one go.

Outside, spring had finally arrived. The sun flooded my room as I sat at my table, staring at the man on my computer screen. I wasn’t up for it—10 am Saturday sessions. But it wasn’t a case of being up for it or not. It’s something I needed to do. I didn’t want to be outside anyway, where my skin sticks out from a mile away.

You wake up one morning alone at 70, your wife of 30 years newly dead from lung cancer, having promised at the start of your relationship to stop smoking and then deceived you all those years.  How was it that you didn’t smell it on her?  Didn’t find the cigarettes? 

In the trees outside her second-story home office, birds chatter manically, the way they seem to on only spring mornings. Somewhere along the street, a neighbor’s dog is caught in a cycle of howling, a plaintive, almost desperate sound, as if in a state of pain or alarm.

I said to my kids, “Trust me, you don’t want to know. You’ll wish you could go back to not knowing, but by then it’ll be too late.”

In the early days of that frigid winter, Whitt spent half his time staring out the kitchen window. His beloved guitar leaned unplucked and gathering dust against a wall.

You are not allowed to speak once the lights go out, and the doors are locked. No one wants to hear your songs once it’s dark, and you’ve been shut away, but you keep singing anyway. Your name is Evangeline, and you will never let it be forgotten.

Like some unseen blight burrowed deep in the local vines, divorce kept preying on Boundary Street. The trend seemed a stealthy contagion drawing closer and closer, its malign influence headed squarely at the Copeland’s corner lot.

One night, we meet the boogeyman. My friends and I, arms linked, are belting a top forties hit. We are a loud and proud girl group. As we crest the hill, a man stands laughing across the street.

We could go years without it ever happening, and then word would spread that we were going to get to see a movie.

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.

Margot never liked her name, which was unfortunate because she was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting to hear it. Margot.

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.

The first time I clapped eyes on Echo Wolfeson she was playing a kangaroo.

New in town, I’d gone to meet the coaches. In Jackson, the sport was politicized. More oligarchy than meritocracy. I went into the Field House prepared to make my case. Show film. Stats. I had it all ready.

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!

Perp-Walk Prologue I was a good girl. Before I went viral, before anyone chanted about locking me up or threatened me with death (at first only online), I never expected to be arrested. When I first got handcuffed, I couldn’t stop crying. Wondering: how can this be happening to me? A hard-working scholarship kid; a

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

The first time I danced for Harry, he would not look at me. His eyes stayed fixed on something just over my shoulder or above my head, so that though it seemed he was watching me as I moved, he really wasn’t. I really, really wanted him to watch. I was wearing the mid-calf indigo

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

1. Just before the Internet. Just before the creeks dry up and shrink, and the heat grows unbearable. Just before they bulldoze most of the woods and build the ugly duplexes. Before all of that, there was the two of us. June and I, selfish, clever, bright and dizzied by our own still-new imaginations. June

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

Queenie had been at her father’s desk at the Massey-Ferguson dealership in Chadron, Nebraska, for almost a month since her return from Madagascar. In that time she’d fired lazy Lefty Gilday and Toot Banks, both of whom drank on the job. Neither had sold a tractor or combine harvester or a baler in more than

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

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.          

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

Tuesday, Sept. 8th – Last “Opening Day” Bullshit As I munch on some day-old bagels, push the sour fruit back and forth across my paper plate, the woman on stage keeps screeching, her words blur across the cafeteria like a raincloud. I can’t even pretend to indulge her. Some self-important ass-hat in high heels, tugging

“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

She came to the island with her two slim volumes of poems and the outfit she always wore to readings. The sweater jacket that her first husband, the artist, had given her. The slightly flared jeans from that store in Soho. And the patent leather flats that turned out to be completely wrong for walking

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 1933 I. The homestead is noisy with bird calls. Who is the particularly worrisome visitor who is disturbing his sleep, his waking? Robert’s mother would know the name of each bird at a snap. Robert’s mother was fond of birds and was delighted with them. He feels uneasy here now, on

“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

Sena Desai Gopal is a journalist specializing in science and medicine, food, and travel. She is the author of The 86thVillage, her debut novel. She was born and raised in India and now lives in Boston with her husband and two children. Her work has been published in The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Modern Farmer,

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

I think about the lies they tell in movies based on true stories. Well, this one ain’t like that—a lie. Wish it was. In Hialeah, people said the devil came up from hell, made Angelo do what he did. His Ina thought it was because of Angelo’s skin—the only other Filipino—darker than me with bigger

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.

Lee thought of himself as a fish. Fish were players; they hung out just beyond the current, in the calm eddies, and waited for things to come floating their way. When he was a little kid, his old man used to take him fishing when the weather got cool, late in the fall, on the

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

“Wake up! Now no more dozing in sweet sleep We have to go. The goddess gave instructions.” They did as I had said. But even then I could not lead my men away unharmed. The youngest one —Elpenor was his name— Not very brave in war, nor very smart, was lying high up in the

  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