Fiction

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

The dirt road stretched out before him in the late afternoon sun, flat and taut like a ribbon wrapped around a present—but this day didn’t feel like much of a gift. He hated driving water trucks back and forth on these monotonous roads. He hated the mindless hours of fuzzy talk-show radio and sagebrush. Hell,

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

1 Across: preoccupied by a worrisome fixation that causes you to turn within O B S E S S E D An email, written but never sent, from Feather to Elise Dear Elise, How could you become so obsessed with somebody that doesn’t exist? I mean, we’re talking about a drawing, unfinished, made of chalk,

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

I sat at the old desk we found years ago at a junk store, sorting bills under the glare of the gooseneck lamp, deciding which ones to pay online and which to send in the mail. It felt like a balancing act, though in actuality the two or three days it took an envelope to

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

For starters I was his type, a lean, long-haired brunette. And we had proximity, both of us were at the University of Washington at the same time. Although he was older than me, we both graduated in 1972. Plus I was into older guys. We would’ve passed each other on the paths between buildings, crisscrossing

In the future, Doppler radar would bounce microwaves off an approaching storm. It would detect phase shift. It would analyze how a storm had altered the frequency of the returned signal. More than sixty years earlier, bellwether for blood, he chooses higher ground, “the highlands” of a town adjacent to a port city. There, on

After Tobias Wolff   I put down my book. I was hungry. I was also cold. We’d turned down the heat as soon as Vera left with her mother for some Fiji Island paradise. The heat bill after we got Vera for a roommate would have financed us to tag along. I went into the

Neil used to play Hasbro’s Don’t Spill The Beans with his older brother, and he’d cry when he’d lose. He’d deny the crying, just like his brother denied cheating by tipping the side of the plastic pot with his finger on Neil’s turn, dumping the beans out. After, Neil would collect the little beans and

Monday, late morning in the restaurant kitchen. Cam slices the plastic wrapped around the five-pound hunk of chicken, and juice sprays onto the stainless-steel table. “Shit,” he says, and grabs a cutting board from the shelf below. He isn’t used to doing this without Matty. Portioning out the chicken, mixing up the roux, making soup

They arrived in Eyeries just at dusk, when Mac’s back was beginning to buckle and he could barely make out the signage from behind his tinted shades. So this was where Lucinda saw herself getting hitched, after all this time, the end of a land mass at the ends of the earth. That seemed appropriate,

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

My rage has a color and a shape-it’s bright orange and round like an egg. The rage doesn’t just happen when I turn on the news-it is triggered by almost any gurgle in my day-a patient whose vein I can’t find because she’s too skinny, a woman coughing without covering her mouth in the frozen

Today Penny stared at the small girl rising out of the sea. The way her head kept turning towards the deep, how one puckered nipple escaped the yellow bikini, the tummy still glistening with saltwater, round and protruding and smooth as a jellybean. A sour-faced woman tugged the wet child along. Penny watched from beside

An at-speed, metal-on-metal collision emits a sharp cacophony of destruction, a series of micro-events producing a soundtrack that the mind cannot unhear. The dirt bike’s knobby tire skitters along the length of the car’s front quarter panel until it finds the narrow gap where the fender and passenger side door meet. The front shocks compress,

The Candidate complained about immigrants, women and Muslims at a formal dinner on Monday; of headaches, dizziness, low energy and blurred vision on Tuesday; collapsed after an arena rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday; was admitted for tests on Thursday; and underwent emergency brain surgery on Friday morning at Banner-University Medical, the best facility in

Technically, she says, our heads are always moving faster than our feet. Technically. Unless you’re walking on your hands, says Julia, and she flips herself upwards into a handstand to demonstrate. She’s never been stable enough to actually walk, actually pick up one hand and put it down in a new place, even for one

I didn’t like my sister very much, but I didn’t mean to kill her. It happened this way.  The garage of my Back Bay townhouse was too narrow for a passenger to get into my old Mercedes, so I told Nancy to stand in the driveway by the viburnum.  She was at an angle I

When my brother-in-law came back from Tanzania, Jack and I picked him up at the airport. He was wearing jeans and a faded green t-shirt, and he looked this way and that along the terminal. I had told Jack I thought we should meet him at baggage claim, but Jack said that Paul preferred this,

Everyone calls him Manteca, which means lard in Spanish. The moniker implies fat and he may be slightly overweight, even a little thick around the waist, but it’s the slippery quality of lard that earns him the nickname.  It doesn’t help that his lips retract when he smiles, with the top lip often disappearing behind

Blame the touba coffee, poured after a platter of djebou djem they stopped for on the way, in melting plastic cups. With cardamom and black pepper, slipped out of the adult world into tiny cups by waiters who assume every tenth grader finishes lunch this way. They are big people: fifteen-year-olds. Tall. With shadows of

An introductory note: It is 1856 in Lucknow, India. Malika is a dancer in one of the city’s most famed kothas, or courtesan houses. On this day, exactly one year after the death of her young daughter, she receives an unexpected visit from her patron, a French engineer named François, and their adolescent son, Etienne. In

  The little girl presses her face through the blown flap of mesh in the porch door and looks out past the tawny clumps of dead grass that lay scattered across the spare dirt plot, down to the wood where the first gusts reach in to rock the loblollies along the riverbank. Storm’s coming baby

My sister Ruth showed up on day four of the blackout, the day we began to suspect this wasn’t an ordinary grid failure. There had been no blizzard, no major wind event. It wasn’t even that cold, though the early November air already held the crisp-edged fragility of the coming western Massachusetts winter. The utility

Chuck Larson, all-state in three sports but particularly potent on the football field, was the most popular boy in high school despite his guess in history that the Rosetta Stone was a ski mountain in Colorado.  He was so popular girls actually fainted—this is no joke—at the sight of him each day as he strutted

Who designed these benches? Wooden slats that imprint your back, the rest of you slipping through. It’s like they wanted to remind you that you’re uncomfortable, that there’s as much emptiness as wood, that if one slat breaks everything becomes more dangerous. And this is a bench, something that’s supposed to be a place to

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

Our lunch break is only half an hour long, but today, Hayeon wants to buy a pet fish, so we close the store early and head to downtown Seoul on a bus. She stares out the window the entire ride, so I don’t tell her that I think fish are dumb and they’ll likely die

On October 13, 2016, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded, amid great controversy, to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”     1 the night before Dylan gets the Nobel Prize, Hayden’s fortune cookie forecasts a change of mind. the morning brings his nightly slew of

The boy runs along the pitted dirt road behind the leaping tire. The tire is almost as tall as the boy and when it lands it wobbles because the steel belt stabs through the sidewall into a cankerous bubble.  The boy releases the tire with one last push and he leans his hands on his

The fossils caused a variety of speculation: was it a parent with a child, was it a pair of star-crossed lovers, was it two siblings or cousins, even? The speculation, as expected, were from lay-people, people who did not know about anthropology yet had no difficulty anthropomorphizing. Which was not to say that the bones

“The gate’s open?” Joy gasped.  She slammed her sneakered foot hard against the brake pedal of the old Rover.  Her torso lurched forward against the tight strictures of the seatbelt. “Jesus, mom! What the hell’s wrong with you?” “What the hell’s wrong with your mouth, Brooke?” Joy snapped at her teenage daughter without turning her

The best thing that could ever possibly happen happened that summer. He was forced to go live with people he didn’t know, people with reasons to try and undo him.  Also, these people scared him because they lived in utter squalor.  At first, he had no earthly idea why it happened. Though maybe that isn’t

This is an excerpt from The Bohemians of Telegraph Hill, a novel based on the life of the photographer Dorothea Lange and her Chinese assistant, Caroline Lee.   Until she was five years old, she had neither a mother nor a name. It was 1906. Early spring, chilly and damp. All year the Chinatown papers

Her grandmother stands expectantly outside the apartment complex, positioned under an awning-covered walkway awaiting her ride. Every time Joyce phones Nana to make arrangements for their once-a-month Friday night bridge game, she urges her to please wait inside. There’s no way to predict how long it will take her to get from the city to

The first time Kashi ran away, we thanked the saints and said, good riddance. Quietly of course. Then, like good neighbors, we went to the Burneys to commiserate. The women sat down with Mrs. Burney on her bed, below the long-stemmed ceiling fan, and were shaking their heads and touching their ear lobes. Allah, Allah,

Part 1: Whose Little Girl Am I? The night I turned sixteen – in 1979 – I dreamt I swallowed all of my teeth, and Aunt Winnie said it meant disgrace was coming to the family. I forced a laugh but exchanged a concerned look with my cousin, Bernice, as a feeling like ice spread

A woman came up to me on the sidewalk and told me she knew what my secret was. Which one? I asked. The woman said her name was Harriet. She’d lived on my street when I was a child, but she didn’t expect me to remember her. I didn’t contradict this claim, choosing instead to

As the sand blew over the mountains, my sixteen-year-old son and I drove west on Tropicana Avenue. I wore a Who t-shirt. Lucien sported sunglasses and headphones that blasted some godawful horrorcore act like Twiztid or Insane Clown Posse, no real melody, a singer gargling scrap iron. I turned up Led Zep, the’66 Dodge Charger’s

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

“I am going to this wedding,” Zebatinsky declared to Carla. His middling daughter. Middle. But the switched word lodged in his brain, as happened more and more these days, branching out tendrils of other words, a not unpleasant process until he was obliged to backtrack its meanderings to the conversation he’d left hanging. Carla in

tempo giusto You’re told what to do from the very beginning. You might enjoy the brief illusion that you’re free to do as you wish, that you have some sort of artistic license, but the command is there in black and white. You have to be steady, consistent. Exact. The instructions guide you through everything.

Chepo Menard ate and talked at impressive speed. He finished the caviar appetizer, chased a few stray eggs on the tablecloth with a moist finger and licked them. A wine stain grew on the linen tablecloth next to his napkin. Adrián Landeros listened, his thoughts hidden beneath his smile. Behind him the breeze entered through

You said you were on the beach with your wife that morning. You might have lounged in one of those wood and canvas beach chairs, or you might have been lying on your stomach on an oversized striped towel from Land’s End. It might have happened like this: You would have been engrossed in the

January 15, 1856 ~ We cannot afford rumors In her mind Malika was an ibis taking flight from the windowsill, rising above the rumble and jumble of old Lucknow. Leaving behind the labyrinthine alleys and bustling Chauk Bazaar, she swooped through the still, mid-morning air along the languid Gomti, following the river’s silt-laden course east,

  I suspected Madeleine had been lying, although I wasn’t totally sure. How could I have been, and maybe, given the circumstances, I didn’t really care to know, maybe I just wanted to keep telling myself this fairy tale about The Amazing Summer of Love, or more accurately The Perfect Six Weeks, that ground to

First of all, he wasn’t. It was only because they had no mother and father. She had a dad and he had a mom, that’s all, which lumped him and her together in Tom’s mind as if he and she had something to learn from each other. The time would come more kids had just

    The Request For his funeral, my father is requesting Get Down Tonight. “Not to listen,” he says. “To shimmy.” He’s off the couch and moving his hips. In the lamplight his belly barely jiggles. “Like this, but with a shroud.” Suddenly he scares me. Making jazz hands like that. He’s young still– a

In the fall of 1982, when my father was nineteen years old, two military guards came to his home in the middle of the night and told him he was under arrest. They read his name from a creased document, assuring him there had been no mistake. My father told my pregnant mother not to

Part 1 Joyce Johnson and Roger Pratt were both raised in the same neighborhood on Chicago’s far South Side; however, he was five years her senior and they did not run in the same circles of classmates and friends. They did not actually meet until the first year of Bush 43’s second term, when they

It all started with bird shit. Well, I guess you could say it all ended with bird shit, but then what’s the difference, really? An end is just a beginning in disguise, after all. I’d just gotten off the phone with Mom. She was worried that them not coming in to see Shawna’s apartment when

And even when Cimmerian snows hung on white threads, tying together the sky and the Earth, and even when spring rains washed away the dirt off his windows, and more so, when squirrels gnawed at the window frames, and jumped off, falling downwards – never did Eugene feel such confusion as he did that Wednesday.

You wouldn’t have seen the girl in the ditch unless you’d been looking for her, but John Carter was looking for her. She was right where she was supposed to be, down in the crook where the grassy slope off of 24 dropped away into trees, mostly hidden at this hour of the night in darkness and weeds.

This is how we sleep: three in a bed, in a dust-grey room with a single window, fused shut, where cracks as stark as lightning forks run amok along the walls.

In years to come, Honey, once Hanhee, would recall it as a Kodak moment circa 1960, that morning when they stood on the 500 block of Potomac Avenue facing a cluster of red brick apartments, their backs to Mount Vernon Boulevard and their only luggage, his gold-buckled black trunk, on the sidewalk, so jet lagged they were beyond sleep.

It was raining the day I performed my first burial cleansing. I remember because it hardly ever rains in Jerusalem and because once you’ve cleaned a dead body and prepared it for burial, you can never unsee what you saw.

JAIMEE WRISTON COLBERT author of Wild Things Interviewed by Patricia Ann McNair Solstice Consulting Fiction Editor   (From Patricia): In Jaimee Wriston Colbert’s fifth book, Wild Things, we readers are lured into small communities and shadowy places close to the murky Susquehanna River in Upstate New York. Here we find ourselves moving through the book’s

MARJAN KAMALIauthor of Together Tea Interviewed by Joanne Carota   Carota: You have lived across the globe–Kenya, Germany, Turkey, Iran, U.S., Switzerland, and Australia. How have your global experiences influenced your characters? For instance, in Together Tea mother and daughter, Darya and Mina, shift into Persian-American familial roles. How do you think their relationship would