Fiction

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…

Subramani knows there’s no getting around phoning Coleridge’s family now that he’s dead. She tastes the sour truth of it almost the moment the call informing her of his death disconnects, right after that little click like a scolding aunt, the receiver still dangling from her left hand while she examines the garden through the…

The only thing visibly wrong with her was her weight, which was tremendous. “I see you’re on the hunt,” he said, and waved her torn résumé in the air between them. (While the FedEx clerks were turned, he’d plucked it from recycling: something about the systolic din of printers emboldened him.) “You see right,” she…

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…

It was some years before I got up the courage to go to the truth café. But when finally I did, it took only a few weeks to convince one of the women in my life to join me. She and I stood outside the café in the midmorning, spring, in a line of other…

Rochelle isn’t exactly sure where to start or what to Google. “Male prostitutes”? “Male escorts”? Do people still say “prostitutes” and “escorts”? She types “male sex workers” in the search bar. The results include a Wikipedia page; an Out magazine interview series on stigma in the industry; and a National Institutes of Health article, “Male Sex Workers:…

When Sima told me about it the first time, we were sitting on a bench in the small park near my dormitory, where the trees offered some relief from Tehran’s relentless summer heat. “It’s this thing where I crave stuff that isn’t food, like soil or chalk,” she explained, her eyes fixed on a patch…

Mappings for a Once and Future Landscape 1. Well, and here you are, uninvited, unwelcome, intruder, having come at last to prowl among my papers at my desk. I know you will have already searched for useful items. I have left you useful items. Others may have looted and left, but here you are, here you are…

Jeannie has never met Alice, and yet she knows Alice. She knows that Alice is here on a study abroad course that her parents think is a waste of time. She knows what Alice likes (iced coffee, cozy mysteries) and dislikes (driving, social media). She knows that Alice comes from the Swettenham tobacco family. She…