Fiction

  Poland, 1920 In darkness they at last reach the bridge at B—, which the retreating Poles in their fury have dynamited. Undaunted, the division commander consults his maps by lamplight and gives the order: "We will wade across." Horses, creaking carts, tachankas—the long column streams down the bank and plunges headlong into the black,…

A girth for pack or saddle; a tight grip; a thing done with ease; a certainty to happen. —Webster’s for cinch Two years had slipped by since Cinch moved into the interior to be closer to the projects where he did most of his work, but mostly Cinch was here because this was where he…

Sasha wished that she would never have to see Boshen again after this trip. She ran to the bathroom the moment they entered the McDonald’s, leaving him to order for them both. He had suggested a good meal in Chinatown, and she had refused. She wanted to see downtown Chicago before going to the clinic…

  Whenever I remember Lin, I think of taxicabs. We spent so much of our time sitting in the back of one, somewhere in Shenzhen—speeding away from the border-crossing station, or returning to it. In my memory it was always a bright morning, sun streaming through the dusty windows, or late at night, our bodies…

The neighborhood got its first dose of Qamar the summer of her ninth birthday, when she sat on the rooftop of her Alexandria apartment building for ten days and waited for the moon to come down. She did it for her neighbor Metwalli; he promised he’d be hers forever if she only brought him the…

Flicking her IV line out of the way with the same movement she would use to shoo a fly, Maria Crowley opens the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Catalogue while the new visiting nurse makes herself at home. This one’s name is Corrine, or maybe it is Doreen; she wears Spandex and polyester in icy greens…

". . . moths hear sounds through their wings." "Moths require only three things to survive and breed: food, shade, and privacy." "Moths don’t eat wool . . . Only the larval form of the moths are wool eaters." There are over ten thousand five hundred identified species of moths in North America alone. When…

  First, her name was Jane, and if that wasn’t bad enough, one day, while she was sitting in the dining hall and drawing her trademark Jews—tiny cartoon men with beards and wisdom who decorated the edge of all her notebooks—the men got up off the page, shimmied down a table leg, and bused her…

When she left in the mornings, her husband and baby were still asleep. It was four o’clock, black and silent, a time when it felt illegal to be awake. She laid her clothes out the night before so she could dress in the dark, just jeans and a sweatshirt, sneakers and socks. And earrings—though no…