Fiction

And that was the year Sister Margaret became Meg. A decade after she left our village, after she renounced her membership with Mothers for Christ, she returned from the big city. Armed with a new name and a new age. “Life begins at forty” was the only thing she said when men asked her the…

Every morning in the hotel lobby, I saw the man: slim, professional-looking, with a bland attractiveness that should have made him instantly forgettable. And yet I found him compelling, oddly familiar, even. Energy crackled between us, unmistakable, an old feeling that returned to me with an unsettling pulse in my groin. I figured he must…

It was some years before I got up the courage to go to the truth café. But when finally I did, it took only a few weeks to convince one of the women in my life to join me. She and I stood outside the café in the midmorning, spring, in a line of other…

Rochelle isn’t exactly sure where to start or what to Google. “Male prostitutes”? “Male escorts”? Do people still say “prostitutes” and “escorts”? She types “male sex workers” in the search bar. The results include a Wikipedia page; an Out magazine interview series on stigma in the industry; and a National Institutes of Health article, “Male Sex Workers:…

When Sima told me about it the first time, we were sitting on a bench in the small park near my dormitory, where the trees offered some relief from Tehran’s relentless summer heat. “It’s this thing where I crave stuff that isn’t food, like soil or chalk,” she explained, her eyes fixed on a patch…

Mappings for a Once and Future Landscape 1. Well, and here you are, uninvited, unwelcome, intruder, having come at last to prowl among my papers at my desk. I know you will have already searched for useful items. I have left you useful items. Others may have looted and left, but here you are, here you are…

They called her Little though she wasn’t anymore. She resembled her father, red-haired and tall. As a kid she’d been the one who hauled with him when his sternman didn’t show. Lobstering was a franker education than what she got at school. If you weren’t in the present, it came and found you. A bloodied…

The Local History project was a partner situation, and Oren was not surprised when he got Imogene Fraser. She was Mr. Serwer’s trusted ambassador, and he, the new student, was treated like a lost diplomat who barely spoke the language. They pulled topics out of a tupperware. Imogene let him do it, and he picked…

The HerbariumMay 1942 The greenhouse shimmers like a glass cathedral. A cedar waxwing alights from a nearby Oregon grape licked by flames of fern. The bird sails to the tip of the greenhouse’s back A, a lemon-bellied wick on a giant’s sunlit candle. Some of its feathers are dipped in red as if to seal a…