I will tell you all about desire. One night, a man picked up his bag and walked. One night, my father picked up his bag and walked, His big brother became the story. My big brother once told a story, He ended up choking on a stroke of joy. If rightly stroked, would you choke…
Everywhere, there are rainbows—on the stairs to Girls’ Block, around the bulletin board announcing our meals for the week, on the playground equipment where we sit during Outdoor Time. (Sometimes Nayeli goes down the rainbow slide, and we follow her, laughing like it’s a big joke—us, pretending to be kids.) There’s a rainbow on the…
If that was the case, she wasn’t to come back to them again. Muneo made this clear to his daughter in the front room of his parents’ house, just north of Shimogamo Shrine. It was the house he’d been born in fifty-four years earlier; the house he’d lived in with his wife, Masako, for the…
1 The reader laid out a bone, a feather, a small rock, then smeared the cards in an arc across the floor. She asked Fern to choose. Fern turned over a woman leaping or falling headfirst from a tower, orange flames bursting from every window. “Oh,” Fern said. “That doesn’t look good.” “It’s not always…
1. When she was twelve and I was ten, Zara stole a handful of henna stickers from my mother’s beauty parlor and applied them up and down her chest. “Boob tat,” she captioned the selfie on Facebook. In the two hours it remained available online, Zara’s adorned sternum reached every aunty in the Jersey Shore…
I The First Time Across the baize-topped table, Lina blushes, and Isabella doesn’t understand why until she looks at her cards. She has won. A month of playing vingt-un with Lina, and not once has Isabella won. It is uncomfortable, unfortunate, but soon Isabella has a notion of what she can do. After…
South Diego says we must caffeinate before the Satanic tour. In a French press, he pours boiling water over coffee grounds, grown and roasted in his village outside of Tulancingo, Hidalgo. We’re sitting at his dining table in a nondescript flat in the guts of the Centro Historico in Mexico City. He says it’s his…
1793 It begins when a three-year-old girl, the daughter of a doctor, dies at her family’s home in Philadelphia. Within a week, yellow fever infections have been reported throughout the city. “Tis a sickly time now in phila.,” the diarist Elizabeth Drinker notes on August 15; “there has been an unusual number of funerals lately…
“. . . home is where our stories are, and that’s not just a question of ethnicity or even country . . .” —Joy Kogawa, Itsuka Alberto Fujimori caught the world’s attention in 1990 by becoming the first person of Japanese descent elected to lead Peru—or any nation outside of Japan. His extravagant campaign and…
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