When my brother tells me he’s been seeing a psychiatrist, I say, "That’s great, Jack." He says, "Why—you think I’m fucked up?" I say, "How’d you find him?" He says, "What makes you think my psychiatrist is a man?" Her name is Mary Pat Delmar, and Jack tells me she is brilliant. He says, "She…
Avila, 1982 When the civil guards approached me and asked me for my papers, I recalled the face of a sunny saint being disemboweled on the rack. Widows in perennial black, addicts of prayer, find comfort here the way monks in hair shirts must take to penance, or me, addled in my blissed-out days in…
A cop car rounds a corner, headlights throw a man’s silhouette large against an apartment building. A window opens from his rib. A woman steps through and pushes off the ledge. She floats four stories. Doesn’t flail. Doesn’t scream or scratch at passing bricks. She is sure as gravity, her fall as inevitable. She floats….
"On any given day, Mother could have her pick of maids. The women, usually Hmong, would line the open markets and scurry after her, offering to carry her bags. Mother decided that she was going to plan a special meal. Father was coming home from the military soon. They would celebrate. The end of his…
It was not as hard to steal the collie pup as he thought it would be. From early morning when the woman set up and wiped her table with a cloth until the time the silver container of coffee was emptied by those coming to look at the dogs, there had been somebody around…
I didn’t know then how couples flow into the space around each other— how Max’s sweet exuberance was only made possible by Rose’s bitter chill. Who knew what that whole generation of refugees had gone through? I knew nothing about them— only that Max had been to Alaska, had prospected for gold. Said words like…
They had no contract. It would be a simple transaction. A sublet in Tribeca for the month of September. Two bedrooms and a terrace: $3,000. They were almost forty years old, children of responsible, middle-class parents, and had created this mess out of their own sordid desires. Josh and Clarissa had lived for twelve years…
In 1936, when a tramp knocked on the farmhouse door and asked, please, for bread and butter, Kate hacked him a slice from the loaf she baked last Wednesday, and spread on it the Holstein butter she churned Saturday morning. He thanked her, Ma’am, and walked down the road looking for Help Wanted, for a…
translated from the Spanish by Ilan Stavans Powerful— but a grain of sand, a fly’s foot, half a milligram of dust entered your right eye and the world became dark and foggy. Streets became staircases, buildings were covered with smoke, your love, your son, your dinner plate changed color, turning into palm trees or…
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