Fiction

Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell “At exactly two o’clock, take a look at your watches,” he announced. “Right when the clock strikes two, I’ll pass on.” A tone that boasted of his all-powerful lineage. He could lift people up, fell them, kill them, make them rot away. Even death: he could summon death…

The year I turned thirty, I broke up with my fiancé and began dating the man I would eventually marry. I didn’t break up with Ajay because our relationship was bad, though it was pretty bad by the end. I broke up with him when his parents wouldn’t accept me, because I wasn’t Indian. I…

Subramani knows there’s no getting around phoning Coleridge’s family now that he’s dead. She tastes the sour truth of it almost the moment the call informing her of his death disconnects, right after that little click like a scolding aunt, the receiver still dangling from her left hand while she examines the garden through the…

The only thing visibly wrong with her was her weight, which was tremendous. “I see you’re on the hunt,” he said, and waved her torn résumé in the air between them. (While the FedEx clerks were turned, he’d plucked it from recycling: something about the systolic din of printers emboldened him.) “You see right,” she…

Anchorage Mama is crying into the dryer again. If there weren’t always a load of towels or underwear to soak up the tears she leaves in that General Electric, it would’ve rusted out by now. Her readiest advice on any bad, dumb day is, “Just go on, honey, and have yourself a good cry”—confusing to…

Me I’ve slept on a concrete floor keloided with lumps of cement and felt the cheapness and rush of the Chansolme builders—who poured down the foundation for our house in Port’Paix—as a mess of tiny hills digging their summits into my back, a blanket under me and a sleeping two-year-old Gigi puffing his baby dreams…

For Sergeant Kyle Buckley, A/2-23 Infantry The rangers in the station at Paradise put every permit applicant for the alpine zone through a murder board. With good reason: over the course of the previous season, one climber fell over two thousand feet down a sloping apron of jagged rocks. Another disappeared completely. People die on…

The sight of God in woman is the most perfect of all.—Ibn Arabi Violence is better than prayer. I know because I prayed for thirty years without consequence, then I beat up a beggar and knew God. I was going to pray even then, though that time I was neither leading the prayer nor giving…

When I returned from the front, I took the most direct route to the hotel room that Cora, the preacher’s daughter, had booked for us. No, that’s not one hundred percent true. The taxi stopped at the marble stairs leading up to the entrance of the hotel; the driver waited while I sorted through my…