Fiction

ELIZABETH SEARLEauthor of We Got Him Interviewed by Aqueela Culbreath-BrittSolstice Intern, Lesley University MFA Student   Aqueela: Much of your fiction seems to incorporate major headlines; how do you decide which headlines you will write about and why take on such controversial topics? Elizabeth: I was raised on News- my Dad was a passionate News

He tells us the story over dinner. We called him Andrew, because he didn’t remember his name. He tells us this: he says that in 1925, there’s a fire at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Marylebone Road, London. The results, he says, are as one might expect. The London Salvage Corps, a sort of reaper

As Anwar the chaiwalla gazed out over the bazaar, over the tops of wooden carts full of fresh okra, spinach, cauliflower, and tomatoes, he saw a blinding white light coming towards him. Behind this light, the shadow of two beings, one shorter than the other, followed. As the images came closer, Anwar distinguished the light

Thirty years later and I still come undone when I think of that night. It’s like a ball of moonlight jammed in my vest pocket, about the diameter of a quarter. If I take it out and set it on the table, then I’m going to have to explain it, and that I cannot do.

  There is a moment, in the midst of a long-distance flight, when I feel like I’ve been buried alive. This allegorical, final act in a Verdi opera, is especially faithful in the cabin’s darkness, long after the complimentary pretzels and movies, when cramped and punished bodies have escaped in pressurized sleep. The flight attendants,

My radiators didn’t heat, my toilet gushed, the washing machine rattled. Next it would be my stove. That’s how it had been in my sister’s house as she was dying from a brain tumor. The toaster, dishwasher, refrigerator, every appliance that could malfunction did, as if in sympathy with her forty-one-year-old body. The weather, too,

Our father, Charles Hartley II, hanged himself in the attic in the spring of 1977. I was five years old. My brother Kelly was eleven. May 25th: the same day that Star Wars opened, though I didn’t make that connection until later. My mother had taken the two of us to see the movie toward

Itty Bit, fourteen, stood in her bedroom in the tiny orange house tapping her fingernail against the doorframe: tap-tap-tap. She eavesdropped on Auntie May who was visiting her mother. “But it’s your purpose, Baby Girl,” Auntie May said. Itty Bit could only see the back of Auntie’s head. Her mother sat on the sofa. “I

I go into the programmer’s office at Stanford and propose my project. The programmer rubs a finger over his mustache and beard, his brown eyes off-focus behind round metal glasses. I can tell he spends a lot of time in his head. The office is a mess. The desk looks like a giant block of

Poor Theo, everyone always says. But there I was in my wetsuit, wading knee deep in the frigid ocean, blindly feeling around to retrieve cut-up pieces of my limited-edition world map that had hung on our living room wall before my brother destroyed it. I must have looked like a madwoman, holding up laminated fragments

This is a picture of two men. I have believed for so long that this one photo explained certain details for me. I found it loose in a box buried at the back of the top shelf of the storage closet in my parent’s old house many years ago when I was a teenager snooping

We’re sorry; you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check the number and try your call again.   When Tyler drifted into consciousness, eyes still closed, there was a peaceful, dark moment before the stab of

Eric calls: Big, big favour love. Can’t tell you on the ‘phone.  Meet for lunch today?  I’ll come down.  Club at one.  Call me at B.H. if you can’t.  Okay? She can never say no.  That’s her trouble.  Damn Eric. One o’clock.  Bloody worst time to meet anyone in the BBC club.  The crowd at

Old familiars, the milky sconces and glass lanterns dangling from blue-and-yellow plaster buildings, greeted me when I came up to the street from the Métro. Can buildings greet a person? They’re inanimate, I thought, but also behave as mirrors for memory, now projecting mind-shots of the last time I was here, him reading the paper

Brad hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch since he’d dropped his duffle in the entryway of his grandfather’s house and started his period of “reintegration.” With the old man in rehab for a broken hip, Brad could sit in the plaid recliner for hours at a time, watching war coverage on TV,

My brother has a prostitute living with us. She came home with him one night and never left. I don’t know her name, but there are a number of her traits I have picked up on. First off, she steals. She sneaks into my bathroom at night to steal toilet paper—uses the whole damn roll.

I drove east, northeast, heading for my father’s house.  In the Cascades my poor vehicle labored and slowed to a crawl, but I kept moving through the waves of midmorning and the crickets buzz and the smell of pine needles baking on the ground.  A warning light on the dashboard came on.  The engine was

On Friday, following a cold night, the thermometer outside the Theatre District branch of Peoples Bank read 90° at 9:03 A.M.  Mayor Bloomberg was on time for the taping of his weekly address.  Zwakker awoke in his hotel with the radio tuned to a Christian station demonizing Islam; he changed the time before he located

“At The Center Of It All”   “I would like it,” Baba said at breakfast, as they ate fresh naan with feta cheese and homemade sour cherry jam, “for you girls to be the next Madame Curies of this world. I would like that. Or even writers,” he smiled at Roya. “Like that American woman:

1967   The voices were like yeast.  They pervaded my whole universe the way yeast pervades a loaf of bread.  Sometimes God spoke to me directly, sometimes it was Satan, Lucifer, the Devil.  If they told me there’d be a plane crash there was, an earthquake, yes, and if they told me to cut myself,

Dark clouds gathered and metamorphosed the sky from bright blue to dark gray, almost black. I feared the prison guards would herd us into the rusted trucks and ferry us back to the prison, foiling my plan to escape. We had just arrived at the farm, a two-hour drive from the prison facility in Masaka

The mother and daughter are sitting in the darkened theater, the blue light of madness around them.  They are watching a horror movie.  Blood-curdling cries escape from the monster faces, a good makeup job. The opening scene is always the same–perfect–all-American, someone mowing the lawn or sunbathing in the backyard–till something sinister happens.   When the

I notice I have not spoken much if at all about the administration of the language school or its director. This is not because I am in utter fear of her, but because to me she seems in a sense, how shall I put it, airy, inconsequential, almost trivial, a factotum in the administrative chain

Kel had been waiting for Ando for half an hour, sat outside the chippie on the kerb. School bus had been and gone and Kel hid behind the wheelie bins while it went past. She spat on the tarmac and inhaled again. Spit, smoke, blow, spit, smoke. You always have to spit after you tek

2nd Lieutenant Woody Bullock sat with his back to the wall, watching two old soldiers converse near the picked-over catering table. To his nine o’clock, a set of double doors led to the hallway and its bank of elevators. Near the doors, Bullock’s old friend, 1st Lieutenant Dan Johnson, greeted new arrivals with the same

Chapter One (Massachusetts, December, 1850) He couldn’t read well, that was the problem. Sure, he knew his letters well enough, thanks to Harriet. He could make out each and every one from the first to the last if he tried hard, could even wrestle into sense the bitty-bit words like “all” and “the” and “so.”

I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.  | Michel De Montaigne   When Ben murdered Evelyn, only a few blocks from where I lived, and I went out of my mind to figure out why, I came to understand that anything lived but not written down

Sometimes, when the children are especially troublesome, Meilin tells them about the Red Guard who sliced open a girl’s neck and poured salt in the wound.

It was a Sunday morning in late May, toward the end of the warbler migration. We had just come in from a bird walk at the cemetery in Cambridge. We hadn’t seen many birds, because I was unable to get Maeve out of bed early enough, but I have learned to hold my tongue when

Part 1: Satan Drives a Tow Truck   My tomato red 1980 Ford Pinto hatchback speeds north on the QEW toward Toronto. The year is 1991, before Google Maps, MapQuest, iPods and cell phones. I am driving because I am the only one who can operate a manual transmission with ease. And the car belongs

Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on,    I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable   Loulie peeks out at the old woman from her position on the floor, her head between her knees, her legs scrunched up between

I remember being in a hallway, at the end of that hallway was a corridor, with the option to go left or right. If I went left down the corridor at the end of the hallway, at the end of that corridor, was an elevator. If I went right down the corridor at the end

You glance out the window at the tranquil spring evening. Three stories down to the glorious almond blossoms and purple magnolias dazzling the campus after long dreary rains. Northern California heaven.

Magali and I crossed the street to the Richardson’s. Nine o’clock in the morning: a good time to get rid of things.

He would put in just south of Jacque Rosier Baygall, where she’d put in, and paddle downstream one-and-a-quarter creek miles to the sandbar

Gabrielle pulls up to a Conoco gas station. “I need to use the restroom. You need anything?”

The daughter waves a hand in front of her mother’s face, fascinated—and alarmed—by the half visible irises

The Tech didn’t notice new patients any more.
This hadn’t always been the case

My mother was a toucher. She tapped her fingers on my wrist, and even though I was sixteen, not really a girl anymore, I loved it, the feel of her pink touch. Such small hands. You couldn’t help but notice.

Guts and glory too; at the trial in the box he said No, no, no. But, he lost.

You stole that truckload of sombreros, Mister Lucas! cried the Judge.

Hell, yes, it was a bad winter: first, Riham’s father gets sick with pneumonia. Two weeks at Greater Memorial, and they’re talking about putting him on a ventilator before he finally looked at a bowl of grey oatmeal and said, “I’m hungry.”

A hawk banked in the gray daybreak, head hunched, eyes darting beneath a cross of wings. What could it see? Nothing scampered or skittered along the ice, nothing gamey or meaty worth a closer look, nothing with fight.

They asked for a story about a “First.” First what: Kiss? Too embarrassing. Date? Forget it.

Claude Charles is an uncomfortable millionaire. He works hard to hide what he calls his “creeping suspicion—that something is not right.”

When Emily Wong moved to Manhattan from Poughkeepsie, she started to freak out on elevators. It began at Saks Fifth Avenue.

Wayne and Abby kept an open package of sleeping pills just sitting around the way another couple might keep a dish of exotic bitter candy that appears to be for anyone to grab

Before I became her darling I towed wrecked machines down the river behind my rowboat. Any kind of wreck you’ve got.

“Ma’am? You may have to leave.”
The deep Godlike voice from the train’s loudspeaker, only live. Anne stiffens in her seat in the Quiet Car.

When Clarion Woodbury was a boy, we’re talking the early 1960s, the New Orleans house of his grandmother was a not very wide, three-story building set on the northwest corner of a shady block.

Our house was the finest house in town, on the highest point of rocks, with the widest view of Boston and the islands and the open sea.

A brittle ray of sunlight is shining on the wall across from me. I want to say, “Cold, I’m cold,” but no words come out.

My mother is dressed and ready to leave the house, but five minutes before we’re supposed to walk out the door

SO MANY of the girls were lost. Miss Guo would just look at them and see the truth and the future all in one glimpse.

It had been thirty-seven months since I’d moved to California and my adjustment had been minimal.

She is lying in a bed in the ICU, her mouth wide open to accommodate the hose of the ventilator, her bony arms blackened by the assault of the tubes running in and out of her body.

I passed the early afternoon lunching with Massimo at his restaurant, Il Pescatore, which he was readying for the season.

You just don’t go knocking on someone’s door and tell her you’ve been watching her for the last couple months. They have a word for that.

If there was a bright side in all of this—and Charley was certainly looking for a bright side—it was that Kate hadn’t driven off with his fingers still stuck in the door.

My questions never shocked you, my appeals to fact. You never ran crying from the room or shunned me when I called out your father, your book.

When the Cheikh called to inquire whether Aicha was in New York, Rama could not lie.

When the Carnahans moved to Spirit Island Estates, it was one of those decisions that on paper looked like a sure thing, a natural path

Mrs. Donovan never prepared herself for motherhood. How she had become Mrs. Donovan, living as wife and mother, was still a bit blurry to her.

Your girl doesn’t call. Why would she? You haven’t heard from her in five days. She isn’t your girl. She was never your girl.

In the light of the gibbous moon, beneath the thick boughs of ancient oaks, a girl pulled her brother from the gingerbread house, trailed by smoke that stank of burned sugar and flesh.

Cedric wasn’t drunk. Spirits from the spirits, he told himself. That was a sober man’s thought, wasn’t it? The neck of the bottle was in his mouth.

A cool, misty fog collects in her hair. Fine droplets gather and flow in tiny rivulets following the smile lines of her face. They slide from her jaw to dampen and discolor her thin blouse. She doesn’t notice.

Dottie was pregnant. I was a math instructor at Seattle Community College. There was an Indian summer that September, not a drop of rain until the 20th. One warm and windy day I took my 5-year-old son Philip to Lincoln Park with a kite.

The road is long and vanishes into a horizon without end. The land is covered with frozen snow as far as you can see.

The boy whose gloved hand I hold as we cross the busy street on the way to his elementary school is my ex-wife’s son. To him I’m Uncle Tim, his emergency babysitter. He’s no blood of mine. I don’t think Austin knows how sick his father is, that the man’s knocking at death’s door, that

It had taken Vaughn Oliver close to two years to bank away the six grand he’d need to buy Jolie the ring she’d wanted—one and a quarter-caret pear-shaped diamond set in a white gold band, size seven—and exactly two minutes to lay it down for a mint—mint—1987 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS. 75,000 original miles, eight cylinder engine, white white white with the pencil-thin burgundy racing stripe slicing down the sides and those easy-in/easy-out tinted T-tops. Not a flaw to be found. Not a crust of rust on the outside or ring of an accidental cigarette burn inside. Sun exploding off the hood and windshield like the car’s own self-sustaining energy. He hadn’t even tried to bargain with the guy. Fifty-five hundred bucks. Let me go to the bank I’ll be back in a minute.

Rabia would not have chosen this house with its reek of store-bought happiness. Shining tiles and light fixtures made-in-China-ready-to-break. Windows underdressed with pretend curtains. Like the girl: her whole life on show.

Bu la am-am taxa bew, ndax ñàkk du wess: never be proud of good fortune, misfortune awaits.

If Jennifer told the story of her life so far, would she tell it as a beautiful dream, or as a nightmare? That’s what Rufino asked her, up on Lookout Mountain. It was a beautiful question. No, it was more than that. It was sublime.

“Honey, your life is a beautiful dream,” said her mother, holding both Jennifer’s hands in her own. “But even beautiful dreams sometimes have bad parts in them. That’s just reality.”

“a pelican
landed on my shoulder
intensely still
like a story
that hasn’t happened yet”

-A. Molotkov, Punctuation Marks

I’m here by the sea to begin my story again, with the pelican. Nightly, it carries to my bedside reports on what has changed, on what has not, on which direction time moves, and whether or not I’m allowed to forget. But its news is static. It hasn’t a pen. This story is mine to unmake.

Later, as is always the case in these matters, there will be talk about both of them. Due to his longer life and larger number of accomplishments, he will have the better claim for being remembered.

The five Mexican soldiers turned in unison as if they had been waiting for him. Then he saw something that he had never seen before – their eyes glowing in the reflection of the fire that was warming them in the pre-dawn darkness.

Vancouver is a young city, and a city of few ghosts. The dead have had little time to find purchase among its blue skyscrapers.

The first time I saw Phil he was wearing a green jacket and a bowtie, and he was putting his big hands all over the people lined up at the bar at the Royal. Beads of sweat shook down off his forehead. The only empty stool was next to me.

Though he didn’t usually keep count, over the past couple years, Blake was sure he had been mistaken for someone else at least six times.

Flat round leaves slid back and forth over black marsh water. Scattered amongst them were occasional yellow fisted lilies, some with their heads closed tight, others opened.