Fiction

My brother talks about the time he was in survival training in the mountains and he had to eat a rabbit’s eyeballs. He’s on speaker phone in his hospital room, whispering. Now that he’s dying my brother has stories in his mouth. I shouldn’t be able to hear him but I do. I met someone,…

The man sat on his stoop waiting for the locksmith. He’d dressed in a hurry. Pajama pants, sneakers, and a sweatshirt—his hair still sticking out in places. He scrolled his phone while the workforce found their stride on the early morning pavement. Nannies passed him on their stroll, babies and toddlers wrapped and swaddled for…

The man she loves has red hair and is afflicted by a nameless and terrible unhappiness. Even so, he loves climbing trees, building small electronics. He loves insects. Today on their dog walk, he stops to move slugs off the sidewalk. She watches how precisely the man she loves takes a fallen leaf, and with…

In his quiet moments, alone with his thoughts, Chuck had to admit: something was wrong with his wife. He didn’t come to the idea lightly, but Alice had been pensive for a few weeks, an attitude that always meant rough seas ahead. That on its own wouldn’t have bothered him so much if she hadn’t…

At certain times of day, light bathed the vase on the fireplace mantel so deeply that the vase turned translucent. Shadows began to flutter underneath the glaze. Cobalt patterns of fish and reeds diffused across the porcelain like ink in water. Shulian claimed that the vase, which had been a gift, was fired in the…

The days when white men and white men alone could find their fortunes in the West from mining green gold were over. It was time for other pioneers to seek their fortunes and build empires that would last generations. Those had been my cowboy thoughts, though I worried about how we would make our success…

It’s a pity atop a tower of pity that Rick is going to die indoors and in town, but if that is how it’s going to be, this is about as good a place as possible. The window looks east, out over the bare trees and rooftops and streetlights and red-and-green-and-yellow-turning traffic lights and the…

I visit a friend and her new baby. You know: that sacred hush of rooms where a new baby lives, steam radiators and winter sun, the scent of fresh diapers and this one expensive French baby lotion. I hold the baby. I remember how to shift my weight from left to right until she falls…

There’s a secret buried in this letter. What I’m about to tell you isn’t it: I am deathly allergic to ugliness, I have been since I was a boy, and by the time you read this, this affliction, which has so exquisitely disfigured my life, will, at last, have finished me. None of this is…