We moved out here only five months ago, and I remain haunted by the feeling that the whole process was in some way too easy. Thirty-plus years brushed away, as if they had not been the key years of our family life. All that time had been given, had befallen us. The transition itself seemed…
Since I was a child, I’ve had nightmares of annihilation. Though they disappeared in my twenties, they resurfaced here and there in my thirties, and in my forties, they became frequent. Sometimes they were tied to world events; other times to stresses at work, in life. During that very long year, they involved being trapped…
Everywhere, there are rainbows—on the stairs to Girls’ Block, around the bulletin board announcing our meals for the week, on the playground equipment where we sit during Outdoor Time. (Sometimes Nayeli goes down the rainbow slide, and we follow her, laughing like it’s a big joke—us, pretending to be kids.) There’s a rainbow on the…
If that was the case, she wasn’t to come back to them again. Muneo made this clear to his daughter in the front room of his parents’ house, just north of Shimogamo Shrine. It was the house he’d been born in fifty-four years earlier; the house he’d lived in with his wife, Masako, for the…
1 The reader laid out a bone, a feather, a small rock, then smeared the cards in an arc across the floor. She asked Fern to choose. Fern turned over a woman leaping or falling headfirst from a tower, orange flames bursting from every window. “Oh,” Fern said. “That doesn’t look good.” “It’s not always…
1. When she was twelve and I was ten, Zara stole a handful of henna stickers from my mother’s beauty parlor and applied them up and down her chest. “Boob tat,” she captioned the selfie on Facebook. In the two hours it remained available online, Zara’s adorned sternum reached every aunty in the Jersey Shore…
I The First Time Across the baize-topped table, Lina blushes, and Isabella doesn’t understand why until she looks at her cards. She has won. A month of playing vingt-un with Lina, and not once has Isabella won. It is uncomfortable, unfortunate, but soon Isabella has a notion of what she can do. After…
Translated from the Korean by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton 1 An ordinary-looking man was not what I expected. He was of average height, at five feet six inches, and had a compact build. His body was marked with scars and blemishes but bore no tattoos. I detected none of the anxiety and fretfulness that convicts…
They met on the night train to Budapest and seemed drawn to each other by the fascination with how different they were—her from Brussels, a place he’d only seen on the map, and him from Draper, Utah, a place she’d clearly never imagined was on any map. That’s why I wanted to get away from…
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