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…

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…

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…

How many nurses cared for her needs? The first dressed Bea’s wound, a puckered red mouth silenced with staples. A second nurse brought her a cup of chilled juice to wash away the sour taste in her mouth. A third nurse, a man, massaged her sore back. Then a fourth nurse came in, a small,…

There are no albums of family photographs in our house. Before he left last Sunday night, Gort must have carried them all out the front door and piled them at the curb for the garbage men. The black marbled copybooks full of nature notes must have gone the same way; when I broke into the…

The last deportations from the town in Poland where my father had been born, and where his parents lived, were carried out in October 1942. The town was declared Judenrein. This word was written in the center of the green ruled page that my father found when he returned to Poland after the war. It…

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…