Nick almost hit the boy. He’d been driving down Burns Avenue on his way to teach a class about a story in which a boy is hit by a car. His mind was empty, an unfamiliar vacuity that made the road—white line between lanes, hill plunging into curves and trees, truck in the rearview mirror—into…
Past 11:00 p.m., the video store was the only shining thing on the highway into the city. The cool, fluorescent light of Video Wonderland spilled into the parking lot; behind the glass storefront, you could see figures gesturing, pointing, moving in and out of view. From outside, such scenes always look warm. Inside, Maggie lay in…
“So this guy goes into a Stockholm bank and takes these four hostages, right?” Karl was talking and hoovering up his nasi lemak at the same time, an extraordinary performance he delivered every day at lunch. As a talker, he was peerless, with the baritone of a podcast host and the gullet of a woodchipper….
He was crawling across the field. Mostly big dirt clods—his son had plowed it clean about a week ago—made up the half section, a hundred and sixty acres. He figured he tripped a football field in. Back on the road, his son sat in the front seat of the truck, staring at his screen because…
“If the duck was a song bird, it would sound like this: nasal, desolate, the call of migratory things.” – Mr. Lies to Harper Pitt, Perestroika IV, Angels in America My sister Agatha Krishna said it started when they came, and that’s where you could put the blame. She said we had to go back….
Hardly anything was out of the ordinary when Esther first arrived. Not that time was in any hurry to slow down out here. Things were in their fairly expected state for this time of year—even if, though the calendar read October, the burner had been high underneath the day since before she’d left Chattanooga. By…
While my mother dozed, I sat in a chair by her bed, thinking about Wamblán, a jungle river town near the Nicaraguan border with Honduras, and about Jacinto, who thought this mole in the middle of my left hand was a stigmata. Jacinto commanded the small FSLN base in Wamblán, a sort of special forces…
When I was six and my uncle was twenty-four, he did something that you can’t do anymore—he took me to a racetrack across the river called Cahokia Downs. That was where I saw horses for the first time—it was 1955, and we didn’t have a television yet, so I never watched Roy Rogers or My…
It was the memory of Ms. Musavi’s arrogant eyebrows, rising up toward her chador like two sideways parentheses, that made Amir lift a hand to strike his twelve-year-old daughter for the first time. Amir and his wife, Seema, had never hit their children, not even a light slap of the hand when chubby fingers reached…
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