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….
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…
The first thing Arnie did was to take out a pad of graph paper, apologize for reading to me from notes, and explain that he was doing so because he wanted to be sure to remember everything he’d planned to say. He even recited his apology from notes, saying he was aware we’d hardly seen each other…
In Sheboygan, toward the end of eighteen months spent stevedoring before disillusionment put him back on the boats, one of the men Tom worked alongside was crushed by a crate when a crane’s strapping gave way and the cargo had swung loose. Mose, the man’s name was, or what he was known by. “I’m Irish…
Suki gave in to the buzz buzz, like a horde of hornets, echoing through the flat. It shook her bed frame and made her brain rattle about in her skull. Daylight through shuttered blinds, noisy street below; bin day. Which day was bin day? Could be any. Suki never knew what day it was, only…
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