Fiction

At certain times of day, light bathed the vase on the fireplace mantel so deeply that the vase turned translucent. Shadows began to flutter underneath the glaze. Cobalt patterns of fish and reeds diffused across the porcelain like ink in water. Shulian claimed that the vase, which had been a gift, was fired in the…

The days when white men and white men alone could find their fortunes in the West from mining green gold were over. It was time for other pioneers to seek their fortunes and build empires that would last generations. Those had been my cowboy thoughts, though I worried about how we would make our success…

It’s a pity atop a tower of pity that Rick is going to die indoors and in town, but if that is how it’s going to be, this is about as good a place as possible. The window looks east, out over the bare trees and rooftops and streetlights and red-and-green-and-yellow-turning traffic lights and the…

I visit a friend and her new baby. You know: that sacred hush of rooms where a new baby lives, steam radiators and winter sun, the scent of fresh diapers and this one expensive French baby lotion. I hold the baby. I remember how to shift my weight from left to right until she falls…

There’s a secret buried in this letter. What I’m about to tell you isn’t it: I am deathly allergic to ugliness, I have been since I was a boy, and by the time you read this, this affliction, which has so exquisitely disfigured my life, will, at last, have finished me. None of this is…

“It’s illegal, you know. To keep them chained up like that,” I say. “Maybe we should call the cops or whoever you’re supposed to call about that. Animal control.” Jas is busy opening and closing every drawer in the kitchen, one by one. Open, pause, close. Open, pause, close. Without looking at me, she shakes…

After we’d discussed the woeful state of my finances, the Sphinx asked me about the woeful state of my plans for my chapter talk. We were conversing during a meeting of the chapter. Not during the meeting itself, which takes place inside the Community Center, but just outside the entranceway where, during breaks, the chapter…

Mother has been brewing phở with her own private stash of Saigon cinnamon for over twenty-four hours in anticipation of the lunch. The entire house is fragrant with its sweet spicy scent. Purchased on her last trip to Vietnam, the cinnamon, harvested near her childhood home in the Central Highlands, makes an appearance only on…

On the terraced hillside above us, there were these clusters of people with enormous smiles. We all watched them from down below. Sometimes they would dance, apparently for us, though perhaps not; slow yet jolly dances in which they swung enormous peacock feather fans over one another’s heads. They would lift their hands up high…