Fiction

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,…

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…

It takes time to learn how the ink bleeds. He would think of a theme—his grandfather’s oxen returning from the granary in a summer rain—and take out the inkstick. Once as long as the blade of his pocketknife, the stick was now just a nub, not much bigger than his knuckle. It was actually a…

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…

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,…

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…