Allison’s mother’s favorite piece of advice was “Be nice to people who aren’t obviously useful to you.” One doesn’t need religion to understand that, Allison thought, but she didn’t follow the advice. Her mother said the Torah was there in case of emergency. “In case of emergency, break glass.” It was funny to hear her…
The circus wouldn’t have liked anyone Sid married. He could date, yes, he fell in love sometimes, but not showily, nothing alarming, and not for long. While many of his employees were married and whole families formed and grew and shifted in his circus across the years, Sid himself had all their lives to stand…
It was an early September afternoon, the air stagnant with rare New England humidity, when the girl came to the island. She arrived with her father, the physician, from Boston. She was the first child ever allowed. An exception, The Council said, as they blew the conch shell like a horn, signaling the boat’s arrival….
It’s like how dogs get before an earthquake: pacing, whining, howling at the door. That’s me. Whole hours before the sky falls, I catch a sidelong view of the disaster, looming like rain clouds out of the north. I’ll be on the phone with my dad when it comes, the question I’m about to ask…
He was in love with someone else, but he couldn’t have her, and so he chose me. He lived with me for seven years and I had asked for nothing. Not even marriage. When you love a holy man, you know that God is in his heart, and you take what you are given. He…
Despite the early hour, JFK is a crucible of city odors and sticky pavement, but there’s only one flight to Seoul every day and they cannot miss it. His children loll like peeling plastic and complain in stereo, the girl bleating and her brother imitating her. If only they would put a sock in it, an English…
There was tons of organic produce, homemade lotions, ski racks on top of their cars, a whole language around vacations I had never heard before. Vats of spinach leaves and chickpeas and shredded carrots and compostable to-go containers that they heaped with hummus and bleeding beets. I emptied their trashcans and scrubbed the toilets of…
Translated from the Hungarian by Ildikó Noémi Nagy She only got to charge her phone every five days. There was someone standing at every wall outlet day and night, just like the appointed guards working in shifts beside the water bottles and tin cans. She fantasized about scrolling through Facebook, writing messages. A laughing emoji…
Goddamn. Lost again on this endless campus, with its Escher stairwells, its minarets, its Starbucks cafes, frisbee fields, its many quads—a regular hexadecagon of quads. I walk around a double-blind corner and find two empty loading docks and a row of empty industrial kitchens. I know I’m already late, but I can’t help myself. I…
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