Fiction

Chuntao wanted to love her job, but the Visitors kept dying. The first was a bright-eyed, ambitious computer scientist, freshly inspired from watching rock-climbing “RockStars” on YouTube. He fell from Mount Siyeh at a height of three hundred feet. White male, Chuntao recorded in the official logbook, the letters ragged from her shaking hand. Age…

You proposed with a mood ring because you knew I didn’t like diamonds. The sun wasn’t up yet. I still had my mouthguard in. My hair was in a ponytail. My mom had just died from an overdose. We were staying at an adobe motel in northern New Mexico. Out the window, you could see…

Deborah Azmera drowned in the drought. Deborah Azmera’s brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, friends, and neighbors—a village of fifteen huts clustered along the receding border of the Rift Valley—drowned with her in the drought. The village used to call itself the mushrooming branch, for the handful of circular huts that lined the…

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic. The time I saw Mama raise a man from the dead, it was close to dusk. Mama and…

That whole winter of 1983, I was stuck inside my mother’s ground floor, three-bedroom apartment on Marlborough Street. I called it house arrest; she preferred the term safe haven. No detail of my recovery was too large or small to escape her steely surveillance. She monitored my morning walking regimen up and down the patterned…

You knew everyone we wished we knew and we loved when you called them by their first names. Salman. Margaret. Arundhati. At each class, you blew into the room, scarf ends trailing and knitted cap askew. You only ever hinted at an excuse before launching into the daily lesson. Avoid exclamation marks! Never use the…

It is May. Or it is June or July—or August. Or maybe it isn’t Simone’s most hated time of year. Maybe it’s just that the days feel long and that they burn, the sensation of being trapped in an oven. The brief peace promised by the night shatters like a pane of opaque glass, pierced…

The hospital room was narrow, with one window that faced another building, a thin strip of light giving the illusion of perpetual twilight. The first night, Eve slept on the bed and Manu stayed in the corner on a vinyl armchair that reclined into a cot. The walls behind Manu’s chair were papered with signs:…

After their appointment with the speech therapist, Carmela set her four-year-old grandson, Lucas, in front of a Jesus cartoon with a baggie of Cheddar Bunnies. He slumped against the couch cushion, exhausted from his tongue and mouth exercises, eyes glazed. Her son-in-law, Jonah—who’d lived with her since her daughter’s death three years ago—would be irritated,…