Fiction

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

Most bodies in this country are shrouded by a gold silk sheet and cremated; some are shrouded in white and buried under a cross or facing a holy land; a small number are even left atop high towers to be shrouded by starving vultures. But Dhiraj didn’t want to go that way; his shroud –

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

“All of us had English accents,” said my Grandfather in an English accent. Ooloovus. “That was how we learned, you know. From the British.” Grandfather was known to have been employed by the colonizers as a butler, the only one anyone had ever heard of in the middling town of Butterworth, Malaya. But he wasn’t

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.

Last night the glass girl came again to my door. For three nights I’d heard her outside, the scrape and clink of her footsteps. At first I’d thought some of the neighborhood teenagers had been playing a game of ring-and-run when I’d gone to the door and found no one there. They played all kinds

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,

Jan rummages through her purse, actually a crammed tote bag, for her wallet with her driver’s license, vowing she’ll never try to cash a check at a strange branch again, but this one was next to the car parts place that had insisted “cash only” once she got there.  She’s banked at the branch across

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

I’ve always been a superstitious man. Even the horoscope in the Tribune or the fortune cookies at Wong’s Happiness Cafe can give me pause, and God knows how hungry I was for change that night at the Zebra Lounge when Bobby Smythe got shot. Bobby was in town for two weeks. And every night, I

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.

                                                                                              — Columbus, Mississippi,1973     For a long time now she has referred to herself in the third person, almost as if she were being interviewed by Barbara Walters. Except that she will never be interviewed by Barbara Walters, because she – not Barbara – pumps gas for a living. And because she –

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

At first the blue girl was nothing but a rumor, a whisper.

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?”

Not that it mattered now,
but the kid had this coming a long time.

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.

The Hat Salesman takes a breath before continuing.

That’s when she says:

“Look, you’ve got this whole Woody Allen thing going.

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.”

The moon glaring above Table Rock’s got me thinking about our field trip up there in ninth grade and falling in love with this girl I never knew before.

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.

The roads are slick, freshly coated with autumn leaves mixed with last night’s rain.

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

Quentin relieved his mother at two-thirty. Abigail, wearing an ash colored dress, touched three fingers to her cheek

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.

The nurse pointed down the long hallway. “He’s in room 202.” She looked Elle over head to toe. “He told me he didn’t have a girlfriend.”

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.

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.

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.

Vincent and Harry have come to install broadband. Zip has convinced me we need this more than we need new kitchen cabinets. Never mind that all the cupboard doors are sprung and that the only way to shut the cupboards is with rubber bands twisted three times. Both guys are short and have buzzed hair with a slash on one side.

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.

“Think of the good things, Avis,” the caseworker tells me. Keep alive that way.

So I close my eyes and try to remember colors.

My head used to be filled with counting things out and checking them off, with keeping track of all my time and all my chores. I made supermarket lists for just how much I could wheel home in my basket, when I was not allowed to drive. What all needed cleaning and cooking. And lists of homework and laundry and what the kids needed. New tennis shoes and leotards and backpacks and decent socks, and how much every thing cost, so I could ask Jerrell for the right money. Lists of what all I was supposed to do, and how many minutes I had to get all of it done right, to keep the peace. How much time before he got home.

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.”

The train tracks were two buildings behind his in St. Paul, but Sam could feel how close they were by the tremor that made the bed frame vibrate. The cars of the train lumbered, and the more Sam squeezed the bedpost, as if to make the vibrations stop, the closer the train was and the harder it became to ignore the thought of his deceased father, which came now at an inopportune moment. Sam could feel the slow movement of the train, as if the tracks on which the train rode were the bones along his spine.

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.

Jason and I have been living at the Hearthstone Inn, in one of the cabins that rent by the week in the offseason, for three months now. It is wet all the time because we are right on the water, and it’s either too cold because we have no insulation, or too warm and close from the heater.

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.

Before she left, Nancy White Feather told Charlie Good Thunder a lot of things–some wistful, some stone-faced angry: “You have got a lot of things on your mind, but–most of all–you have got horses on the brain–forever on the brain.

I had my jacket on and zipped. I was wearing my burgundy parka, the same one I’d had since middle school, seventh grade, and it still fit me fine nine years later, and it looked about the same, too.

Later that day, someone would claim to have seen a surface-to-air missile strike the plane. Another witness on the ground would claim two or three missiles, he couldn’t be sure.

It was 10:30, they’d been searching the flat fields west of town only an hour, and already she needed to rest. Emily looked at her father, sweat glistening across his forehead, his skin flushed.

There are over five hundred diseases that list headaches as a symptom, from hangovers to brain tumors to the bubonic plague.

How sweet were those six, seven, and eight-hour love marathons on the rickety bed near the window with its brown, stained shade drawn almost to the floor …

The man who drives the gas truck is built like a fireplug. He’s got a shaved head and goatee. He paces in front of his rig while it idles. I’m in his way. I’m parked over the underground tanks, filling my tires with air. Not only do I drive a Prius, but I look like