Fiction

  The soldiers keep Margaret in view. She carries her tripod, unsteadily, and an extra poncho for a bib. That they have let her come this far might be due to the weather, or possibly the kinds of amusements of which she remains unaware. Still, assume that they watch, tracking her as she stomps along…

  a novel excerpt She lost me as the nation was losing Richard Nixon, good riddance, whose head bobbled on his neck like a newborn’s, as mine would have, but whose five o’clock shadow was like the truth coming out. A loss to no one but himself.       She sought for me early in the Ford…

Out on the front lawn, Melinda was weeding her father’s garden with a birdlike metal claw when a car drifted up to the curb. A man with brown hair highlighted with blond streaks got out on the driver’s side. He stood still for a moment, staring at the house as if he owned it and…

translated by Rebecca Morris and Pamela Casey A young Tibetan sits in the sand by Zha Ling Lake. He is skinny and about eighteen. The throbbing sun scorches his thick dark hair. The lake is silent before him, a steely blue. The Kunlun Mountains reach up beyond the lake, iced snow coating the tops, peak…

Molly’s father was a physicist, and not the garden-variety kind. He had been in one of Orion’s college textbooks as the Eisenstat Principle of something or other. Matter? Motion? Orion didn’t remember, although it was assumed he knew which. The Eisenstats assumed many things. "I take it the two of you are planning to get…

Mrs. Venkataraman had never seen a black man before. There they were in the arrival lounge at Murtala Muhammad Airport, with their coal-black skins and eyes, pawing through their passports, looking for the residence visas her husband’s university had obtained for them, shaking their heads and laughing loudly, saying Eh-hehn Eh-hehn over and over again….

  She is standing in the doorway of the barn loft, swaying backwards and forwards. Both her hands are over her head and flat against the inside of the lintel; her heels come off the floor on her forward motion, and she keeps her toes down on her backward motion, curling them around the rough…

  I stood on Mr. Silvia’s porch with my last thirty-six dollars rolled in a rubber band tucked between breast and belly fat.       I remembered the house from when I was a kid. Back then it was a gap-toothed barn where we played while birds flew in and out above us. Now it was a…

from House of Widows Like most men under the right circumstances, my father could walk on water. In fact, he did it often, and sometimes he took me along. Together we stood on the frozen whitecaps of Cape Ann looking back at the lights of our town on the Massachusetts north shore. Even half a…