Fiction

When Tayo Musa was awaiting execution, his primary emotion was surprise. He had not foreseen his life turning out this way—which is to say, ending this way. He was not a political person. He had joined the marches because his friends said they were about freedom. Mr. Musa liked the idea of freedom, and his…

“So this guy goes into a Stockholm bank and takes these four hostages, right?” Karl was talking and hoovering up his nasi lemak at the same time, an extraordinary performance he delivered every day at lunch. As a talker, he was peerless, with the baritone of a podcast host and the gullet of a woodchipper….

There was once a young couple whose daughter was born with a weak heart, and on the evening she turned three months old, her heart began to fail. As she lay still in her crib, her parents began to notice all the dreaded signs the doctors had predicted: labored breath, swelling, an unusual sleepiness that…

I don’t know what to do with my ghost in the city. It’s too familiar here, too sticky. The freight train clangs along outside. Flat car, coal car, oil car. I wondered if there were hoboes in trains anymore or if they had moved on to other transportation or if they had ever existed in…

The lake lies heavy and flat, like it’s pressed under glass. At dawn, a grey vapor creeps low across the water and disappears into the tangle of trees, like a predator going home to sleep. Once a week, I bail out the boat. This is my only chore. It gets so heavy with rainwater that…

Because of a headache it would turn out I only needed to sleep off, I hadn’t gone to school the day a car struck down Osbert Tetteh. Osbert was the boy I was closest to in class four. I was the girl he was closest to. That day, my mother had waited until ten a.m….

The fortnight’s visit that Audrey Dyer paid her old friend Dorothy Bly, conserved in twenty cabinets. The toilet After the plane and the Tube and the unfamiliar walk and grubbing around in the flowerpots until she’s found the key, Audrey needs a piss, and so the first part of the Bly household that she takes…

Back then, everybody smoked. I knew guys who could jump-start a Zippo lighter just by snapping their fingers. People smoked in restaurants, movie theaters, airplanes, trains, college classrooms, funeral homes. I’ve seen people smoking, chest deep, in swimming pools. Children smoked back then. Monkeys in roadside zoos smoked. In junior high school, we had a…

My brother—ever emotive, ever sentimental—did one of those 23andMe tests, which I had advised against, but that’s Harlan. Harlan and I are twins, extremely NOT identical—and were supposedly the product of donated sperm, plus a donated egg, which were combined and gestated in a surrogate mother. Three strangers, none of whom were our parents. We should have…