I Jacob has been dead for years. Your partner, a seven-foot giant with a raucous laugh and freckled, sun-burned skin. The man who adored classical music and quoted Dickens with a British accent. Who bore, without a grudge, your…
your cousin Breno begins collecting garbage. He rips the wrapper off your Sprite bottle, drains the brine from your Pickle-in-a-Pouch and keeps them, temporarily, in a plastic bag he carries wherever he goes. He transfers everything to the binder…
It was the typo in a blurb on the jacket that made me buy the book, the book I’d avoided for years. It sat on a table in the Strand, a bit tattered, a bit stained, with that typo…
There were forty-nine white roses in the arrangement nearest to me. I counted them twice. Someone at the florist wasn’t paying attention. The front-row chairs were upholstered in dark red velvet, which was thinning at the edges. I rolled…
i. Many things about the new wife I had married worried me. Presently, I feared that marriage had turned her timid. She sat at the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her glasses were…
The day felt sticky, the low, black sky weighed down with the scent of monsoons. With puddles beneath their feet and shut umbrellas in hands, they shuffled into the building in their damp dhotis and saris, an elevator heaving…
It’s Inventory Week at Baumgartner Plumbing Supply. Their parents are gone and, for five nights, won’t be home until morning. At nearly sixteen, Heidi has been told she is no longer a child and is therefore old enough to…
Every month or so, a new one would show up in the lingerie department, having flown in by accident through the huge sliding glass doors in Housewares. Celine liked to keep an eye on them, willing them toward the exits…
Rumors swirled around Mari like a second shadow. Rumors that her mother had abandoned her at a gas station, left her strapped in a booster seat in the back of the car with the keys in the ignition. That…
Apa was my running coach. He told me, Get legs high in the air—tink of leaping caribou, tink of the high kick, tink of the spirit dancers floating off to the sky. I ran with all my might, lacking…
