Fiction

April 1995 With his ear for a tune and facility with languages, Chaim Traum should have excelled at eavesdropping, but he did not. Something went wrong in the step between deciphering and understanding, a failure to move inside the conversation and string all the fragmented phrases together. His wife was more skilled. Through their daughter’s…

Diane holds the map in her hands and turns it counterclockwise. She notices how awful her dry, broken thumbnails look, and she tilts the palms of her hands upward to conceal them. "This is the park where we were dropped off, so I think we are here somewhere." Diane taps Zhonglu Road with her index…

from The Searchers The song on the radio reminded him of Puerto Morelos. It was syrupy and trashy and reminded him of the girl he’d loved there, briefly, at sixteen. Reminded him of ceviche made fresh on the beach and bananas con leche, and of the couple who owned the bar, Tony, the gringo hippie…

It turned out there was another mother at my son’s nursery school whose father had killed himself. I learned this when I came back to Boston, ten days after my father died. I dropped my son off at the school and watched as he darted off, quick as a released minnow, into the space that…

The Sharma family’s trip to Bombay didn’t go well. The Royal Nepal Airlines plane started acting funny after half an hour—a strange sound choked the left wing, and the plane began to hiccup—so they had to land in Patna, where the passengers were forced to stay in a hotel for the night. The mishap would…

At the very northern edge of the Soviet Union, just west of the Kara Sea, there’s a city called Dickson, which is exactly the spot I used to focus on on the map on my bedroom wall when I was trying to fall asleep. By the time I was twelve the map had been moved…

  Clare can’t walk. She has sprained her ankle so badly, it’s no better than broken. Marble step, wet leaf, a moment of distraction, and she was pulled up, several feet above the landing and dropped like a bag of laundry, her fingers sliding down the wet iron banister, her feet bending and flopping like…

In Spain I never rode the Talgo. The Talgo was the express train from Barcelona to Paris, but I never went to Barcelona. This was years before the Olympics, and Franco was finally dead. The white gorilla was still around and all the Gaudi, but I never made it there. Partly it was the expense….

  When do you begin traveling? When your airplane lifts off the ground? When you leave your house for the road? When you pack? When the plan first comes to mind? When you admit to how restless and ill at ease, even murderous, you feel at home? When you take your first steps? When you…