Fiction

You knew everyone we wished we knew and we loved when you called them by their first names. Salman. Margaret. Arundhati. At each class, you blew into the room, scarf ends trailing and knitted cap askew. You only ever hinted at an excuse before launching into the daily lesson. Avoid exclamation marks! Never use the…

It is May. Or it is June or July—or August. Or maybe it isn’t Simone’s most hated time of year. Maybe it’s just that the days feel long and that they burn, the sensation of being trapped in an oven. The brief peace promised by the night shatters like a pane of opaque glass, pierced…

The hospital room was narrow, with one window that faced another building, a thin strip of light giving the illusion of perpetual twilight. The first night, Eve slept on the bed and Manu stayed in the corner on a vinyl armchair that reclined into a cot. The walls behind Manu’s chair were papered with signs:…

After their appointment with the speech therapist, Carmela set her four-year-old grandson, Lucas, in front of a Jesus cartoon with a baggie of Cheddar Bunnies. He slumped against the couch cushion, exhausted from his tongue and mouth exercises, eyes glazed. Her son-in-law, Jonah—who’d lived with her since her daughter’s death three years ago—would be irritated,…

It was Rashmi Sahota’s third day back in the office, and though she felt clammy, she also felt rejuvenated—at least in spirit. Staff at the care service observed the Wednesday morning with the faint effort given to Friday afternoons. The phones were silent, so banter lingered longer than usual, and a mindless conversation over whether…

In the West, we have always prepared for the big one. We affixed bookcases and dressers to the walls, Velcro, L-brackets, anchors butterflied behind the sheetrock. In the guts of the houses where we could not see, hurricane straps butted joists to larger timber, the bracket named for another disaster but effective also for ours….

We are the children of Cavan. Do you know of that place? It is a border town, betwixt and between, a place of cross roads— and yet strangely few pass by there. The land around is low and sodden, a place of scrub and straggly pines, lanes and paths leading nowhere. The damp comes up…

When Luce gets home, the girl is standing in her living room. She looks about thirty, raw and full of want. “You must be Luce,” the girl says, wheeling around. Jangling energy flies off her in every direction. She’s been sent up from a magazine in the city. Luce has agreed the girl can stay…

She had a bed that came out of her wall. Every night, she made it appear and every morning, she made it disappear. “I never knew anyone like you,” he told her the first time he watched the magic trick. “What, a grown woman with a murphy bed? You think when I was your age…