Fiction

excerpt from What Women Don’t Say, a novel When Stefania picked me up at the airport, I could tell that the weight of my visit was beyond her capacity. Out of duty to her father, she had traveled south to Catania as soon as the school year finished, because he wasn’t feeling like himself. Stefania had already…

Three boys talked idly as they meandered along the railway. The prized swim hole could be reached via the footbridge that ran parallel to the railway line and down an embankment to the water’s edge. That was the easy route. Another more challenging way to get there exercised the boys much more. It involved a…

Let me tell you first that I am not one of those weeping women from support group, the ones who offer you a tissue and rest their hand on your arm while telling you that they understand. On the first day I stood up and said, “You don’t understand me any more than I understand…

Kimberly sat outside at the coffee shop when Caleb Bless ran past, waving from across the street. Like everyone else, she had gorged on the headlines: Newly divorced Caleb Bless on Bourbon Street, intoxicated, giving lap dances to passersby; Caleb Bless brawling with patrons at a bar, at a hotel, at a park—brawling, even, outside…

The girl showed up in early March, the rainy season, a baby tucked under her arm like a picnic basket. Hanna, just finished mucking out the pig stalls, was checking the seedlings in the greenhouse. In the watery, indecisive light that passed for spring these days, the little shoots looked depressed and anorexic. Outside, the…

The first c is sharp; a rock scraped against pavement. The second c is as smooth as a stone washed over by waves. They look identical. Interchangeable. But they are as different as the crescent moon and the snake, slowly strangling its prey.  Two syllables. The first means, to be able. To be permitted. As in, I think I can…

Pa Houa had spent hours in front of a screen foraging through old, forgotten phrases. The poem she was trying to write had vanished. The longer she sat, the more tense her arms and legs became, the more her cursor crawled between caesuras and spaces reserved for commas. She tried tearing down the curtain of…

I had always been so bored when having sex. It was a source of great contention between Lynette and me. Every night in bed I felt the suffocating hands of her desire. She would give me a certain look through half-lidded eyes and I would duly lie down. Then she would sit on my face,…

Allison’s mother’s favorite piece of advice was “Be nice to people who aren’t obviously useful to you.” One doesn’t need religion to understand that, Allison thought, but she didn’t follow the advice. Her mother said the Torah was there in case of emergency. “In case of emergency, break glass.” It was funny to hear her…