Fiction

It’s because you’re a woman that you don’t want me to die, Tayari says.     On their way home, the No. 6 train sidling its slow way through the South Bronx, she has her head in his lap, her long gangly legs splayed out over three seats, fingers hooked into his dreadlocks. She likes to…

Would you like to take a tour of the park? Recently, they’ve put up the strangest statues. I don’t understand them, but they tell me you don’t have to. I’m curious to see what you think. Do watch the steps. The last one is chipped. We have to cross the lawn, but first we should…

Tommy, when he was alive and could speak clearly without spit gathering in a big drip at his chin, would kiss Dee’s nose and warn her not to waste her time trying to figure it out, why it was so big. “Just love the nose,” Tommy’d say. “Love it and love the lips the same….

Months after it has all come out, Annie will go on thinking about Baby R and Mondo and how it could just as easily have been her. And yet, somehow Annie had always been able to slip away, hardly aware that she was doing so.      Today, she was walking into the locker room,…

Of nearness to her sundered Things* A coral necklace, white, with a gold clasp. We had always thought coral was pink, but no, this coral is the color of egg shells. The beads are round, like pearls, and in size grow from the size of a pea to twice that where they must have hung…

"To be taken in everywhere is to see the inside of everything. It is the hospitality of circumstance." —G. K. Chesterton   Before the Flood, before the Hurricane, before the Twin Towers crumpled to dust and the glaciers thawed and the world picked up its heretofore plodding pace toward Doom…before BlackBerries, before iPods, before that…

She had lived in the best cities of the United States and Europe, in the best times, but at age fifty-eight, she’d ended up near a small college town in western New York State that was so rural there were more coyotes than people. And so poor that between the two, the coyotes were the…

From this point forward, Regina would bow to the gods of arbitrariness, kneel to whim, capitulate to kismet.    From this point: after years (two to seven, depending how you calculated their separations) of not being sure if he wanted to be married, teetering on the fence for so long it seemed he was stuck…

Old Zhang, the security guard at a government housing complex, was about to leave his room to lock the wrought-iron gate when he heard a heavy, yet muffled thud from outside. He rushed out, guessing that a flower pot had dropped from an apartment above, a not-uncommon accident because many families liked to grow flowers…