No one was having a good day. It was December in Minnesota and we were all at a stage in our lives where our therapist thought we might be less loserlike if we met late Monday morning. Late morning because early morning wasn’t an option for some of us—because some of us couldn’t keep ourselves…
We fight about her birth control pills, for one thing. They cost about twenty dollars, and Tamara wants me to buy them, and that is something she has wanted for some time. At Planned Parenthood, they have my name on a form, she tells me. She writes down the address and sticks it in my…
The night before he left for basic training, Ebo had one last pigeon to kill—a cream barred homer from the old line of Stichelbaut. The bird was from a long strain of impressive racers, a gift from his mother when he was nine years old. Ebo had put off killing this bird, his favorite, by…
The Twerp’s new record has been playing for hours, but it seems like days. It seems like it’s been playing his whole life. His ears have turned red from excitement. It has that sound, the one he has been describing his whole life. In this room of rooms, the walls have walls and he lingers…
Kyle Waller was retired from his job at InvoTech for exactly twenty business days when he found himself crouched at the helm of an old fishing boat, sputtering across the jade skin of the Mopan River in Belize. The boy Oscar was at the stern, manning the rudder while the woman from Florida and her…
The first time I saw Kemi she was causing a scene. Everyone stopped to watch—the boarding house staff, the students they were checking in, and the parents carrying luggage into the hostels. In front of the hostels, in the open space where cars were parked, a woman stood by the back door of a shiny…
Dixie Every year at the family reunion—before Cousin Monique comes to your rescue—the uncles sit back in their folding chairs and napkin-necks and ask about your father. They take you in with age-soggy eyes, as you stand before them in a floppy blouson and skirt. You look different now than you did in 1970 or…
(novel excerpt from Peace at Last) “M. Nobel, the reputed inventor of nitroglycerine, has been visiting this and the other copper mines for the purpose of introducing this powerful explosive agent. M. Nobel assured Captain Stevens that by this compound the great masses of copper, upon which gunpowder has no effect, can be sundered.” —Travel…
He said the sky is not blue or white or gray. It is the color of one septillion snowflakes falling to the ground. He said a septillion is one followed by twenty-four zeros. More zeros than you could ever write down in one sitting because you are an impatient child. An only child. A singularity,…
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