At sixty-two, I am already old. Brittle as the sticks we used to gather for kindling, voice careful now and full of draughts, skin like hide. There’s not much that I can keep down–a boiled potato mashed into milk, a slice of bread and butter, a mug of tea if it has been left to…
Dr. Katya Vidović stands outside the hospital courtyard gate, watching the Reptile Man exercise his pets. He has come to entertain the girls—her patients—who are prone to unnatural behaviors when left unsupervised. They’ve been known to pull out their own hair by the fistful, to tattoo their inner arms and thighs with the needles of…
The news would have been shocking anywhere but seemed especially so in a town like ours, or so we liked to believe: a young mother choosing to asphyxiate herself and infant son in the family Volvo while her husband was at work in the city and their daughter in preschool at the Episcopal Church. Everyone…
The first time he shared a room at the Hotel Río Azul with a woman, he was young and the country was at war. The government celebrated the New Year by announcing that the war had ended in a victory for the Army. On New Year’s day the UNGR guerrillas struck back, blacking out the…
from The Swank Hotel There was a girl, way back, who was going to become the patron saint of the mentally ill and their caretakers. The girl loved her father, and her priest loved her in a fatherly way. Her father, the petty king of Oriel, loved his queen. To him, the queen was perfect,…
Gneshel liked Rabbi Spitz right from the start. He reminded her of a frog. Though he was eight inches shorter than her, had a lazy eye and a metastasizing bald patch, she liked him. Experience had taught her that he was unlikely to reciprocate the feeling. Orange juice and autumn leaves should taste the same,…
I’m mopping the floor when he walks in, the future 42nd President of the United States. A little bell clangs, and a gust of wind fills the shop, as if—at the sight of the southern Governor who appeared on 60 Minutes just the week before, the candidate whose campaign is ablaze with celebrity and scandal—the…
At fifty-three, there is an ungainly weight to Dr. Elijah Crutcher’s body, a lack of spontaneity that he feels in his thighs as he goes up, up dark steps, following his young lover’s angry flight. She is twenty-eight. Moments ago, at the art reception beneath, she laughed effusively with the gallery host, the curator, a…
Kei wears everything he needs to look the part: sunglasses, even when the sky is darkening; a black suit, the sort most people only wear to Buddhist funerals, with a pack of Hopes visible in the breast pocket. He never takes off his coat, no matter the season, and when the occasion presents itself, Kei…
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