Fiction

He was late to pick me up at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport, my daddy. Back then, in 1998, before the escalation of terror scares, parents were pretty comfortable letting their kids fly by themselves under the care of the airline—at least, my mother was! I was a shivering blub by the time he arrived….

I was born some time in 1972, in a country I’ve never seen and to parents I’ve never known. When I was a few months old, I was left in the care of a stranger who will always remain a shadowy figure of inexplicable love in my imagination. At some point, this stranger handed me…

What you need to understand is this: Skeeter was really very fat. It would be impossible to tell this story without mentioning that fact. She would mention it herself once in a while, although in the past this would usually be in the midst of an altercation with her husband, who was not fat. “You’ve…

The first thing my mother taught me to say in English: I live on the Main Drain Road. 76894. My mother is in the pistachios. My father is in the almonds. My mother says I was four. She says I went to Señora Espinoza for daycare and I watched a lot of telenovelas, and I…

First things first: I have bad feet. Otherwise this entire incident would never have happened. I prefer not to go into details about the feet—they’re rather intimate parts, don’t you think? Witness foot fetishes, for example. Or the binding of women’s feet in China, for which many cultural reasons have been adduced, but which always…

One man, an Argentinian (but of proud European pedigree), had called her Carmen. He explained that she had a gypsy’s skin. Will you leave me, mi gitanita? Will you take my money when the wind turns, like your storybook kin? He hummed the Habanera for her. You know Carmen, the opera? She had only nodded,…

She hadn’t texted him in three days, which for most people wasn’t long (to be fair, most people never texted their exes at all), but for the two of them, for Brian and Emily, three days was notable, it was out of the ordinary, it was worrying. They’d established a frequency after the initial six-month…

Translated by John Vater   Sadiq Miyan managed to restrain himself at first, but then couldn’t hold himself back any longer. There it stood: a completely new bicycle, abandoned—without even a lock to guard it! Sadiq Miyan cast a quick glance around him, then ran his hand over the bike’s glittering handle, as if caressing…

He’s been blacklisted four years already when the committee finally calls him to testify. Does that mean he has nothing to lose? There’s always more they can take from you, even if your name is Zero. Dignity, conscience, honor. Maybe he can live without those things, but they can’t have my balls, he tells his…