Fiction

Her 8:30s are late, the first of the day. She waits out front, beneath the largest of the three dogwoods. It’s strange to be here, standing like this, pretending to have arrived a relative stranger to this house. But she’s been here her whole life, hasn’t she? Frosted branches hover and reach in the morning…

Restless, you find yourself in New York again. An unlikely place for your ghost to turn up, since during your time as a mortal, you were so unhappy here. Everyone knew it. Ten months and five social disasters later, you set sail for Spain, for Granada, vowing never to return to this godforsaken city. Yet,…

Mid-morning, mid-June, the sky thick with moisture, blanched milky as a cataract overhead, the horizons blurred, gone vague and unreliable. The tiered streetscape of apartment, office, and shop windows reflect the wet air back in an overlap of sodden drifts, the heat feeding upon itself as effectively as despair is said to, already over a…

The man they call her husband never married her and never asked about what she left behind in the old country—what or who. It does not matter. The past is behind her, across the Atlantic. Less than a week on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires, then a steamboat up the river to the landlocked…

Translated from the Hungarian by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess1 What he noticed at first were white areas here and there on the wall between pictures. There were no replacements, nor did they rearrange the paintings, as if the bare spaces didn’t bother them. Even though the boy remembered that they used to move them…

Freya feels glamorous, commanding, when she exits a plane. In Brussels, in Burbank, arrival feels strong. She likes to be on her feet again, reclaiming the atmosphere, the world at eye level. The person you envision waiting is the one who matters most. The people she sees, even now, are her parents. Not the boyfriends…

You be the flowering lily, I’ll be the broken- down car on the lawn. Isn’t this May afternoon, this glass of iced tea, the breeze worth lying for? Let us drive through the heart of spring and never leave the yard. We’ll wrap our lips around the nozzle of the garden hose and drink to…

When the wildness comes over her again, the villagers give her a wide berth and well they should. The rage runs so hot through her blood that she won’t even throw herself into the sea—the force of her fury would only bob her back to the surface. When she meets Bride in the lane, she…

What they did to Eddie the night he overdosed was put tubes up his nose and needles in both arms and then roll him into a room in the hospital where machines made dull roaring noises, and he had to hear the hissing inhalations from other bodies in other beds. It was not even quiet….