Fiction

Joseph cursed his face in the cab’s rearview mirror. A mix of old and new betrayed the convergence of time. Grayed goatee and riverbeds of crow’s feet; salt and peppered hair. When he smiled big, dimples sank into his laugh lines. A hint of boyhood lit Joseph’s eyes. He had little else to show for…

“Jimmyjimmyjimmyjimmyjimmy,” he said to his new friend as he lay on the bed in detox. It was early afternoon, and he was still dressed. There was mud on the front of his shirt and on his jeans, and his boots were muddy too. He’d had his wife stop along the country road on the way…

The gun goes off. The gun just goes off, is the way it seems. I’m aiming at the sky and the barrel flashes. The clip holds nine rounds. Nine flashes. And the sound! Oh, the sound of a .45 pistol firing off into the solitary deep of a 3:00 a.m. night out in the country….

I gave the girl my wife’s nightgowns. Her sexiest lingerie. Back when my wife still used to wear those things for me. Back before I started drinking sixty beers a day. 24/7 drinking. I don’t know if the girl wears them. Maybe she wears them for someone else now. That would be some weird shit,…

Around ten years ago, in December, as the Mayan Long Count calendar appeared to begin another five-thousand-year cycle, Ian sat at a café drinking a succession of espressos. He had been anxiously waiting for something. For the end of days, for the aliens to come. The day rolled by uneventfully enough, and he decided to…

Families have certain things they believe in and things they don’t believe in. Certain rules they live by. My family didn’t believe in nail clippers. In fact, I didn’t know about nail clippers until I was in my late twenties, some years ago. My husband came into the bathroom while I was cutting my toenails…

After you betray him, you will try to explain yourself. You will sit at his computer, the one he fell into and never returned, and you will stare at the screen inches from your face, but your fingertips will hover above the very keyboard he could never leave and you will feel like the woman…

My husband’s sister calls at mealtimes. Paul leaves the table and takes the call in the study, even if we’ve just sat down to dinner. At one time I would have waited for him—ten minutes or an hour, however long it took Tara to outline the parameters of her latest calamity. Tonight I keep eating….

Right away, Raj could tell Rupa apart from the other passengers. Even though he’d encouraged his mother to send her in American travel gear, she’d arrived in a homespun sari that looked like a hand-me-down, beleaguered and wrinkled as it was from the long journey. She clasped her hands together in greeting and tried to…