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,…
Translated by Kari Dickson She has to get the asylum seeker back to the church. She found him wandering around in the woods behind the church, he’d had enough, he tried to tell her in a language she couldn’t understand, but she knew that was what he was trying to say, all the same; he…
I say: “I guess I’d better take your name…” She says: “It’s Shelley…as in Byron, Keats, and Shelley.” “Hah!…I’m glad you like them too!” I say. “Oh, yes,” says Shelley. “I wish my name were Keats, but it’s not…” I add. “I do too!” she responds. “Thank you for choosing Verizon Wireless.”
A sudden gust of wind blew strands of Polly Stillman’s brown hair across her face, obscuring her view of the late afternoon sun on Hatch’s Bay. No matter, she didn’t see a composition anyway. In past summers, this scene usually inspired a painting—of beach grass shadows slashing the bright dunes; of a large rock, encrusted…
Begin with the priest, that towering old man, narrow as a cornstalk and motionless in the vacancy between lectern and pulpit. His attachment to the tick-tock undertaking of time is acting up. He gets stuck in certain moments or skips ahead like those oft-scratched forty-fives of his youth. Stationary on the elevated platform, he poses…
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