Fiction

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…

“It’s illegal, you know. To keep them chained up like that,” I say. “Maybe we should call the cops or whoever you’re supposed to call about that. Animal control.” Jas is busy opening and closing every drawer in the kitchen, one by one. Open, pause, close. Open, pause, close. Without looking at me, she shakes…

After we’d discussed the woeful state of my finances, the Sphinx asked me about the woeful state of my plans for my chapter talk. We were conversing during a meeting of the chapter. Not during the meeting itself, which takes place inside the Community Center, but just outside the entranceway where, during breaks, the chapter…

Mother has been brewing phở with her own private stash of Saigon cinnamon for over twenty-four hours in anticipation of the lunch. The entire house is fragrant with its sweet spicy scent. Purchased on her last trip to Vietnam, the cinnamon, harvested near her childhood home in the Central Highlands, makes an appearance only on…

On the terraced hillside above us, there were these clusters of people with enormous smiles. We all watched them from down below. Sometimes they would dance, apparently for us, though perhaps not; slow yet jolly dances in which they swung enormous peacock feather fans over one another’s heads. They would lift their hands up high…

Maggie and Joan took the two o’clock boat to Sugar Island. A man was supposed to show them his camelback sofa: green velvet upholstery, scrolled arms, feet like talons. Seven hundred. The ad said it dated back to 1908. This struck Maggie as disgusting—a hundred years of butts—but Joan loved old things, and she wanted…

My future mother-in-law, Big Bad (not her real name), was knocking on the reclaimed, all-natural, urban woodcraft teak door of her guest bath, saying she wanted to personally assure me I had nothing, literally nothing, to worry about, she had everything under control (Big Bad’s favorite place for everyone), and there was absolutely nothing I…

With each streetlamp we passed on our way to the marina, I could see the two young men in the back, sitting calmly but so clearly afraid—counting prayer beads or looking at signs over metal roller shutters on storefronts as if they could read Turkish. Next to me was Imad with one steady hand wrapped…