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…
Anchorage Mama is crying into the dryer again. If there weren’t always a load of towels or underwear to soak up the tears she leaves in that General Electric, it would’ve rusted out by now. Her readiest advice on any bad, dumb day is, “Just go on, honey, and have yourself a good cry”—confusing to…
Me I’ve slept on a concrete floor keloided with lumps of cement and felt the cheapness and rush of the Chansolme builders—who poured down the foundation for our house in Port’Paix—as a mess of tiny hills digging their summits into my back, a blanket under me and a sleeping two-year-old Gigi puffing his baby dreams…
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