Fiction

  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…

Call number: 305.235 G127t It is evening, crack Internet researcher, and you have fortified yourself. At the bodega. Your form is top, your liver is poisoned, you have steadied your frail nerves with the requisite malt liquor product. Ambrosia of the Gods! Sixty-four ounces of the fruit of the plains, the hop, and you are…

  The taxi pulled to a stop in front of a brownstone whose wrought-iron gate looked oddly familiar. It was a rainy Sunday evening. The last traces of light hung morosely in the sky, illuminating rows of brownstones whose façades were uniformly lifeless, as though everyone inside were hiding, or away. Jason fumbled with his…