Fiction

Image of various rats

The Rat King Scattered

“Every animal has just enough brain to preserve its own hide.”   In the backyard of our first house, the roots of the sod we laid wouldn’t take. The front, when we moved in that spring, was fine if a little weedy, but the back was thatched up with the dead: long overgrown and run…

Image of a black background with nautical images

Oceans

Theirs was a landlocked tribe, generations deep: ghettoed in the old country, urban in the new one, smart, klutzy red-haired Jews of the Ashkenazi type, and not a fisherman in the lot, until we get to Lily’s father. Chicago-born-and-raised, he begged a pal to take him to a lake, and next thing you know, there…

Image of brick wall with a boarded up window

Emmanuel

It is never completely quiet in Gilot. The UN tents crowding the hillsides up here are thin as air and swelter in the night heat, dense with the smell of urine and bodies. Before sunrise, you can hear babies crying down in the ravine (especially Lovely’s baby, who is sickly) and tin pots rattling around,…

Image of a yellow background with a brick wall covered in green vines

Ruin Value

In spite of what the radio told us, we knew Berlin was likely lost by the time the cherry blossoms opened. That was when the dead women began appearing beside the Landwehrkanal. Once a week we found them sprawled as though sunbathing next to that bottle-green water. But while I’ve seen many reactions—quick grimaces, the…

Image of a rainbow smoke cloud

The Darling

Margaretta was sitting on the topmost step of her front porch, in a faded pastel-colored sundress, barefoot, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands—lost in thought, I surmised—when I first went to see her. Her husband was in the front yard, his hands on his hips, surveying the sky, where dark rain clouds were…

Image of woman bending over a pond

Granite Ledges

Sitting in his favorite chair on the screened porch on the ledge overlooking McHeard’s cove—what they could now see of it through the trees—Freddy Willems was reading his daughter-in-law Annie’s essay, yet another one, planning to tease her about how she did “go on at length,” when one line stopped him: “After her sister died,…

Image of a black background of twins

The Twins

Harry and Greta were twins. He was—or so their parents told them—older by nine minutes, and therefore when they argued, he claimed to be older and wiser, the one whose opinions took precedence and to whom she should defer. She laughed at him, of course; she had spent her young life laughing, and when he…

M130

1. Unless Henry was losing his mind, the laser printer at work had apparently attained some level of self-awareness. It must have happened during lunch Friday, because when he left his desk to grab a sandwich at the place downstairs, it was just a regular printer.   2. Specifically, it was an HP LaserJet Pro…