The handshake haunts him. Those fingers continue to brush against his palm. The grip crushes his knuckles, yet surely there was also warmth? Even sincerity? Certainly, the flexing hold of those vice-like fingers had communicated some shock, some force. A sudden blooming of an inner light, even a sting of humanity? Rufus would like to…
I was standing on the packing line when I overheard it. Apparently, Bettie Page was in San Bernardino. The information came from Jim Wake, a man I’ve never particularly liked, but after hearing him swear up and down that the former pinup was actually around, I decided to join the conversation. “What the hell are…
Cenk checked his Rolex as he waited for his car. It was past 11:00 p.m. The glass over the black dial with silver numbers reflected the multicolored lights from the towering Boğaziçi Bridge, which was less than two hundred meters away and dominated the skyline. The changing lights zigzagged like the pattern on a backgammon…
We moved out here only five months ago, and I remain haunted by the feeling that the whole process was in some way too easy. Thirty-plus years brushed away, as if they had not been the key years of our family life. All that time had been given, had befallen us. The transition itself seemed…
Since I was a child, I’ve had nightmares of annihilation. Though they disappeared in my twenties, they resurfaced here and there in my thirties, and in my forties, they became frequent. Sometimes they were tied to world events; other times to stresses at work, in life. During that very long year, they involved being trapped…
Everywhere, there are rainbows—on the stairs to Girls’ Block, around the bulletin board announcing our meals for the week, on the playground equipment where we sit during Outdoor Time. (Sometimes Nayeli goes down the rainbow slide, and we follow her, laughing like it’s a big joke—us, pretending to be kids.) There’s a rainbow on the…
If that was the case, she wasn’t to come back to them again. Muneo made this clear to his daughter in the front room of his parents’ house, just north of Shimogamo Shrine. It was the house he’d been born in fifty-four years earlier; the house he’d lived in with his wife, Masako, for the…
1 The reader laid out a bone, a feather, a small rock, then smeared the cards in an arc across the floor. She asked Fern to choose. Fern turned over a woman leaping or falling headfirst from a tower, orange flames bursting from every window. “Oh,” Fern said. “That doesn’t look good.” “It’s not always…
1. When she was twelve and I was ten, Zara stole a handful of henna stickers from my mother’s beauty parlor and applied them up and down her chest. “Boob tat,” she captioned the selfie on Facebook. In the two hours it remained available online, Zara’s adorned sternum reached every aunty in the Jersey Shore…
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