My husband’s sister calls at mealtimes. Paul leaves the table and takes the call in the study, even if we’ve just sat down to dinner. At one time I would have waited for him—ten minutes or an hour, however long it took Tara to outline the parameters of her latest calamity. Tonight I keep eating….
Right away, Raj could tell Rupa apart from the other passengers. Even though he’d encouraged his mother to send her in American travel gear, she’d arrived in a homespun sari that looked like a hand-me-down, beleaguered and wrinkled as it was from the long journey. She clasped her hands together in greeting and tried to…
1 And this will be her, a lonely woman on the threshold of the ocean. Early morning and the tall waves will break in black and white and mauve. Quickly, she will bury her dress in the sand so it won’t blow away. She will feel her body acutely aching from the night before,…
Rosemarie knew the flight would be long and difficult—nineteen hours from New York to Buenos Aires—but she’d thought that she’d made all the necessary preparations. None of them seemed to be of much use, though: the special horseshoe-shaped pillow, melatonin, the relaxation app, not eating the airline food, and drinking only water. She’d made herself…
Shea sees the tent from a long way off before she decides it is a tent. The shape is all wrong, figures outside in arterial-red rain gear—movements too breathy. The red matches the red of the tent, popping against the gray-green of the mountains. A giant, globed, spherical cloud hovers just behind them in the…
The encounter I am about to describe took place in October or November of 1990, late at night, during an Amtrak trip from Chicago to Ann Arbor. On that route in those days, it was not uncommon for trains to make unexplained stops miles from the nearest town, then sit for hours. For the most…
We bought a house. Right before the pandemic hit the planet and turned all thoughts of the future into a gooey mess. Would there be one? A future I mean. How smart would it be to sign those closing papers when maybe the entire planet’s population teetered on the brink of going busto? But we…
Paulie showed up the day my mother had her heart attack. He arrived after midnight, all long legs with big feet tucked into sneakers that looked like giant marshmallows, bedhead, and a sneer curling his lips. His mother didn’t bother to come up and thank me for taking him in. She didn’t have space for…
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” my wife says softly with lowered eyes. She is afraid I may change my mind again. “Ellie, dear,” I reassure her, “I do want to come with you.” Her face brightens, and she promptly puts her gloves on. Her fingers fidget with the black satin…
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