Fiction

John-John had been saving dollar bills toward a dream and when he had a shoebox full of bills he sat down to count out his future. “One, two, three,” he counted, all the way up to ten to make a neat stack on the floor and soon, he had two hundred neat stacks in exact…

The house was a forest remembering itself. The pine trees that held up the walls dreamed of stars dwelling in their needles. Jointed, branched, rooted, the trees still listened to the wind. The oak floors gleamed from the generations of human oils, but they still grew into their immense lineage of light and matter. The…

Now it happened in the twelfth month that James and Crowbar visited Renah, James’s sister. They were there to never lift a hand. Just their fork expecting something on it. The two men drove from Nail, Arkansas, along Highway 16 to Red Star, where Renah had her cabin nearly built into the hills. Her goats…

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…

The Low Road Soon she headed into the wind. Sepulveda Boulevard would lead her to the cornfields and crows of Scripture, a field gullied by rainfall, and parking lots where men sat in cars smoking. Sometimes they got out of their cars and went to the bathroom in a cement barrack. This action scared her…

for Melissa and Ricardo of Melissa’s Piano Bar Santorini, Greece Are they crazy?” “Yes.” “I think my officers would like to shoot these crazy people.” “Of course. But their deaths would reflect badly upon me.” A white woman and two white male companions lay unmoving on the ground, on their bellies, their hands tied behind…

It was Labor Day, September 2, a Monday, five years ago, and I was twenty-seven years old and about to bring my forty-four-year-old mother and my forty-four-year-old father together for the first time in my adult life. All my life I had daydreamed about this moment, wondered if it would ever happen, and now that…