Despite the early hour, JFK is a crucible of city odors and sticky pavement, but there’s only one flight to Seoul every day and they cannot miss it. His children loll like peeling plastic and complain in stereo, the girl bleating and her brother imitating her. If only they would put a sock in it, an English…
There was tons of organic produce, homemade lotions, ski racks on top of their cars, a whole language around vacations I had never heard before. Vats of spinach leaves and chickpeas and shredded carrots and compostable to-go containers that they heaped with hummus and bleeding beets. I emptied their trashcans and scrubbed the toilets of…
Translated from the Hungarian by Ildikó Noémi Nagy She only got to charge her phone every five days. There was someone standing at every wall outlet day and night, just like the appointed guards working in shifts beside the water bottles and tin cans. She fantasized about scrolling through Facebook, writing messages. A laughing emoji…
Goddamn. Lost again on this endless campus, with its Escher stairwells, its minarets, its Starbucks cafes, frisbee fields, its many quads—a regular hexadecagon of quads. I walk around a double-blind corner and find two empty loading docks and a row of empty industrial kitchens. I know I’m already late, but I can’t help myself. I…
The first thing Arnie did was to take out a pad of graph paper, apologize for reading to me from notes, and explain that he was doing so because he wanted to be sure to remember everything he’d planned to say. He even recited his apology from notes, saying he was aware we’d hardly seen each other…
In Sheboygan, toward the end of eighteen months spent stevedoring before disillusionment put him back on the boats, one of the men Tom worked alongside was crushed by a crate when a crane’s strapping gave way and the cargo had swung loose. Mose, the man’s name was, or what he was known by. “I’m Irish…
Suki gave in to the buzz buzz, like a horde of hornets, echoing through the flat. It shook her bed frame and made her brain rattle about in her skull. Daylight through shuttered blinds, noisy street below; bin day. Which day was bin day? Could be any. Suki never knew what day it was, only…
Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell “At exactly two o’clock, take a look at your watches,” he announced. “Right when the clock strikes two, I’ll pass on.” A tone that boasted of his all-powerful lineage. He could lift people up, fell them, kill them, make them rot away. Even death: he could summon death…
The year I turned thirty, I broke up with my fiancé and began dating the man I would eventually marry. I didn’t break up with Ajay because our relationship was bad, though it was pretty bad by the end. I broke up with him when his parents wouldn’t accept me, because I wasn’t Indian. I…
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