Fiction

The morning after my husband’s vision of the end of the world, we picked up the show rabbits from Dubuque. An old college buddy was the only breeder in the tri-state area with the Dwarf Hotot. My son, Mason, had seen them in Rabbit Fancier and dreamed in spots and tiny bobbed ears for weeks. I couldn’t…

His rental bike was as big as mine, so I chose a more difficult path that wound into a deep valley a few miles from the campsite. The small, red guidebook said it was an advanced route. I insisted. Me, my wife, and my son. About an hour in, I became separated, hurt my foot….

And that was the year Sister Margaret became Meg. A decade after she left our village, after she renounced her membership with Mothers for Christ, she returned from the big city. Armed with a new name and a new age. “Life begins at forty” was the only thing she said when men asked her the…

Every morning in the hotel lobby, I saw the man: slim, professional-looking, with a bland attractiveness that should have made him instantly forgettable. And yet I found him compelling, oddly familiar, even. Energy crackled between us, unmistakable, an old feeling that returned to me with an unsettling pulse in my groin. I figured he must…

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…