Fiction

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…

The circus wouldn’t have liked anyone Sid married. He could date, yes, he fell in love sometimes, but not showily, nothing alarming, and not for long. While many of his employees were married and whole families formed and grew and shifted in his circus across the years, Sid himself had all their lives to stand…

It was an early September afternoon, the air stagnant with rare New England humidity, when the girl came to the island. She arrived with her father, the physician, from Boston. She was the first child ever allowed. An exception, The Council said, as they blew the conch shell like a horn, signaling the boat’s arrival….