Fiction

It was some years before I got up the courage to go to the truth café. But when finally I did, it took only a few weeks to convince one of the women in my life to join me. She and I stood outside the café in the midmorning, spring, in a line of other…

Rochelle isn’t exactly sure where to start or what to Google. “Male prostitutes”? “Male escorts”? Do people still say “prostitutes” and “escorts”? She types “male sex workers” in the search bar. The results include a Wikipedia page; an Out magazine interview series on stigma in the industry; and a National Institutes of Health article, “Male Sex Workers:…

When Sima told me about it the first time, we were sitting on a bench in the small park near my dormitory, where the trees offered some relief from Tehran’s relentless summer heat. “It’s this thing where I crave stuff that isn’t food, like soil or chalk,” she explained, her eyes fixed on a patch…

Mappings for a Once and Future Landscape 1. Well, and here you are, uninvited, unwelcome, intruder, having come at last to prowl among my papers at my desk. I know you will have already searched for useful items. I have left you useful items. Others may have looted and left, but here you are, here you are…

Jeannie has never met Alice, and yet she knows Alice. She knows that Alice is here on a study abroad course that her parents think is a waste of time. She knows what Alice likes (iced coffee, cozy mysteries) and dislikes (driving, social media). She knows that Alice comes from the Swettenham tobacco family. She…

“It’s a dying art, you know.” Leopold says this to me as I am chopping up the chicken for the lions. I just grunt. I don’t see anything artistic about chopping up one hundred and fifty pounds of dead birds for three giant cats that always look at me like they are wondering what I…

1. She angled the camera for what she called the money shot: two attic eyebrow windows and a nose-shaped balcony off the second-floor master. If we squinted from the driveway, we could make out the mouth, the Dutch breakfast door that cut you in half at the stomach. The face of evil, the mother said, laughing, rubbing…

The pilot was talking about the most recent sighting of the wild man in the park. A dentist and her daughter had glimpsed him while on a camping trip. This glimpse had been fleeting and, mercifully, at a distance. He’d apparently not been wearing any pants. “No pants,” I said. “That’s right,” said the pilot….

Alex’s alley was better lit than the street. When she’d moved to San Diego several years before, Alex had started going for walks in the twilight hours, when the sun was dipping behind the trees but before it got too dark. In Chicago, she’d preferred to walk at night, when people were home from work…