Oscar bought a mannequin so he could drive the HOV lane at rush hour. He bid her off eBay and dressed her in an oversize pantsuit that his wife hadn’t worn since college. She had jagged cheekbones and a black wig. She was lean. His wife, Daphne, called her Dora. “Dora?” Oscar asked, staring at…
Contrails crisscrossing overhead, spreading puff by fading puff into each instant of the past… dull notes, antiphonal clouds lined out against the blue, arpeggios down that road as far as we can hope to go… …
The last time this type of celestial event was visible from Earth was more than seven hundred years ago. The Dark Ages. Dante was at work on the Commedia, writing in the mornings, breaking at noon to masturbate and have his tea, then back at his desk until dusk. King Philip IV ordered the kidnapping…
She was the stain in the teacup that spread up toward the handle. She was the handle that snapped off the hairbrush, and She was the hairbrush he tossed onto the fire, and She was the fire he carried each day in his pipe. She was the pipe the bath water rode to the river,…
That it was fine linen flawlessly stitched, as silken as new skin. That it was the color of ivory or an old book’s pages left blank in the front. In the beginning shape of the letter A, it made a long A sound. With lace. Because she was heard to say it…
The dome, the mustache like a circus strongman’s, those shoulders people still climb on. and eyes that hold you in the snow before stacked and battered volumes of mutually exclusive systems of belief: UFOs, black magic, Madame Blavatsky’s wisdom received at the feet of lamas, while yours grow cold in the slushy street. His look…
So many have died, to pick just one seems willful, unkind, and besides you might forget the friend you promised never to forget, so let this be for anyone who died in this season of death, which from now on will be full of faces coming forward, smiling from the page like the line hastily…
In fiction, our winner is Tomiko M. Breland, for her story “Rosalee Carrasco.” Ploughshares’ fiction editor Margot Livesey writes: “In the elegantly structured ‘Rosalee Carrasco,’ Tomiko Breland describes the before and after, as well as the actual events, of a very particular day at middle school. The voice is elegant, empathetic, and vivid without…
Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. —“The Secret Miracle,” by Jorge Luis Borges M woke up in a strange room with her name, Leeza, on his lips. A…
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