The first thing Arnie did was to take out a pad of graph paper, apologize for reading to me from notes, and explain that he was doing so because he wanted to be sure to remember everything he’d planned to say. He even recited his apology from notes, saying he was aware we’d hardly seen each other…
In Sheboygan, toward the end of eighteen months spent stevedoring before disillusionment put him back on the boats, one of the men Tom worked alongside was crushed by a crate when a crane’s strapping gave way and the cargo had swung loose. Mose, the man’s name was, or what he was known by. “I’m Irish…
Suki gave in to the buzz buzz, like a horde of hornets, echoing through the flat. It shook her bed frame and made her brain rattle about in her skull. Daylight through shuttered blinds, noisy street below; bin day. Which day was bin day? Could be any. Suki never knew what day it was, only…
Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell “At exactly two o’clock, take a look at your watches,” he announced. “Right when the clock strikes two, I’ll pass on.” A tone that boasted of his all-powerful lineage. He could lift people up, fell them, kill them, make them rot away. Even death: he could summon death…
The year I turned thirty, I broke up with my fiancé and began dating the man I would eventually marry. I didn’t break up with Ajay because our relationship was bad, though it was pretty bad by the end. I broke up with him when his parents wouldn’t accept me, because I wasn’t Indian. I…
Subramani knows there’s no getting around phoning Coleridge’s family now that he’s dead. She tastes the sour truth of it almost the moment the call informing her of his death disconnects, right after that little click like a scolding aunt, the receiver still dangling from her left hand while she examines the garden through the…
The only thing visibly wrong with her was her weight, which was tremendous. “I see you’re on the hunt,” he said, and waved her torn résumé in the air between them. (While the FedEx clerks were turned, he’d plucked it from recycling: something about the systolic din of printers emboldened him.) “You see right,” she…
Anchorage Mama is crying into the dryer again. If there weren’t always a load of towels or underwear to soak up the tears she leaves in that General Electric, it would’ve rusted out by now. Her readiest advice on any bad, dumb day is, “Just go on, honey, and have yourself a good cry”—confusing to…
Me I’ve slept on a concrete floor keloided with lumps of cement and felt the cheapness and rush of the Chansolme builders—who poured down the foundation for our house in Port’Paix—as a mess of tiny hills digging their summits into my back, a blanket under me and a sleeping two-year-old Gigi puffing his baby dreams…
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