I was packing up my stuff to go home when Valdez stepped on a forgotten land mine in the field near our barracks. Carver and I ran outside and watched a faraway cloud of dust and Valdez particles float back down to the ground. “Shit,” I said. “Who even knew there were mines out there?”…
Translated by Andrew Wachtel I walked ahead, there was no other path.Doors cut us off from the past: mama was aging,the tree burned up, and something was wrongwith the sick man’s chest.Everywhere I went a beggar woman followed,with a belly bloated like a globe,but she didn’t ask for cash or to sing a song.Like some kind…
Monte set the glass down and raised the gun, waved it around like a kid with a toy. Elgin was across the table, his hands in his lap. “Whatta you say I just shoot you right here and now?” Monte said, like he might or might not be joking. But then Elgin shot first, a…
In the first full summer of our marriage, when Karen and I were expecting our first child, someone tried to break in one night through the back door. Before that, I’d been going on a lot of solitary night walks. It was one of the hottest summers on record. We were renting the ground floor…
The crab apple tree had just fluttered its pink petals over the front lawn when Mary Dooley pulled up to the curb in the small U-Haul. I was on my balcony polishing my toenails—a deep red to contrast with my winter pallor. I paused, the tiny brush suspended over my baby toe, to watch as…
I got involved with Gregg Evans Langley through my friend Xandy, a young mime artist I had befriended when we were teaching at Chautauqua once. Xandy phoned to tell me he’d met a guy at a Chelsea opening who had a weekend place near me and he’d given him my number. The only details Xandy…
Bunsen burners click on, throats closed for a safe flame. The roomtepefies—pipettes veiled in thin fog. Litmus paper drops like sleeveson a dress. Every girl measures: reds, blues, acid, acid, base. Someboys huddle around the fire, burn the edge of our assignment, laughat how an eraser cooks in the blaze. I’m tired of the slow…
Many years before Zhao lost her right arm, she had used that arm to slap her husband, Yue, in a public denunciation in Wantu. Her hand had hurt after the slap, tingling at her side as she stood and watched Yue kneel in the dunce hat, so that even now when she remembered the incident,…
Scientists are a strange tribe. I was strange too, by the time of that long summer of 1995, but I wasn’t part of the tribe. A little over fifteen when my uncle brought me to the lab, I was too much trouble to be left alone, and the lab, less a means of keeping me…
No products in the cart.