Fiction Archives - Page 12 of 66

Zara

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…

Isabella; or, The Coin Purse

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…

Snapshots of a Life in Flight: An Essay in Cardinal Directions

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…

In Praise of José Watanabe

“. . . 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…

Number 474

Translated from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton 1 An ordinary-looking man was not what I expected. He was of average height, at five feet six inches, and had a compact build. His body was marked with scars and blemishes but bore no tattoos. I detected none of the anxiety and fretfulness that convicts…

Budapest

They met on the night train to Budapest and seemed drawn to each other by the fascination with how different they were—her from Brussels, a place he’d only seen on the map, and him from Draper, Utah, a place she’d clearly never imagined was on any map. That’s why I wanted to get away from…

Pata Negra

Gabrielle said I was always pining over a white girl, which wasn’t true, except for that night, when I was in fact pining over a white girl named James. Though none of us were girls anymore. Gabrielle and I were twenty-nine. That’s what I hated about being close to someone who had known me since…

The Dead Zone

1 So this your real, ehm, body? The real you? No silicone for Ms. Velvet Lace? I say it’s really me, of course. I say it pleasant as can be, like I’m still working the register at Key Food, even though these men don’t look like nobody I know or want to know. It’s two…

Translation

Hannah didn’t realize her father was a person who needed to be married, like a philopatric sea animal, until after the divorce. “He’s a nurse shark,” her mother explained. “No matter what, they always go back to the Dry Tortugas.” Hannah didn’t know what her mother meant, but she suspected her father now preferred his…