Fiction

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…

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…

for John Casey   It is only ever about power, see. Pick the crowd and pick your vantage point, then watch. Learn the con, you have to learn to look for what does not originate in ordinary. Hats will tow you in; and shoes. One good hour on watched shoes you learn the lessons of…

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…