Fiction

It is my birthday, my twentieth birthday, and I’m in the bar of one of the Art Deco hotels on the beach when I meet her. They are always using this hotel on Miami Vice, although they are careful to take tight shots of the pink front and not show the bums and junkies down…

The father took the children for long walks on Sundays because he imagined they shared his enthusiasm for the flat fields of the Beauce in summer, with the light clouds drifting across a pale sun, the hawthorn hedges flecked with fragile white flowers, and the edges of the wheat stained with red poppies. But the…

April Owen shows up at my flat around midnight. He doesn’t knock, but I spot him waiting in lurk beyond the screen door. Outside, the rain jumps like pixies on the floodlit blacktop. His hair is soaked and his boots are muddy. “Come on in,” I say, and he does, slowly. His eyes have that…

The waiter called me over from my table with a wave. It was a wave first with his hand, but then with his eyebrow and his smile, and with a nod of his head to be sure. He called me over more with these than with his hand, and so I got up. In an…

Exiled from yourself, you fuse with everything you meet. You imitate whatever comes close. You become whatever touches you. –Luce Irigaray,This Sex Which Is Not One At night I sleep without movement in the suburbs of a Phoenix desert, having dreams of hot plants in the Andes, dreams filled with parents as they talk to…

Mama warned me, stay away from white girls. Once I didn’t. So, thirty years too late I’m minding my mama. That’s how it happened. I saw her. Flurries that night and she’s running, bare-legged, wearing almost nothing at all, and the snow’s rising up in funnels, like ghosts, spinning across the street till they whip…

The Mexican Mother Meets the Oldest Living Virgin of Manila Q ueridisimo Doctorcito: Thank you for the foetus you sent me. The baby boy. Would you say I was a jazz poem, spit from the mouth of a saxophone? Or would you send me straight to hell? Pensamiento, pentimento, pimiento . . . Can you…

You could not call it an actual crucifixion, Doctor Hébert thought, because it was not actually a cross. Only a pole, or a log, rather, with the bark still on it and scars on the bark toward the top, from the chain that had dragged it to this place, undoubtedly. A foot or eighteen inches…

Bad Ways On the Flathead Reservation you can come to a spot in the road where the wind smells like sulfur, a dark smell, something you think you should be able to leave behind you, but it will be in your clothing and in your shoes. And there will be a darkness in the way…