The sign is nailed to a two-by-four, part of a raw wood skeleton built around the door. In the last few minutes the snow has brightened, and the barbed wire fencing and the trees on the horizon scrawl out messages—mainly that any notions I might’ve had are wrong here. I walk past a dog in…
Charley sponges off the dinner dishes—hers and Karim’s, the girl’s, the Goat’s—then slots them one by one into the rack to drip. All the while staring straight ahead through her reflection into the night. Despite the heat, unusual for Paris in late October, she keeps the windows latched against police sirens and Maghrebi rap and…
Just before noon on a Friday that is, better late than never, the first perfect day of spring, a bell on the Commons starts to ring. For years this bell had been bolted inside an Erie & Lackawanna train engine, riding the rails along the Cuyahoga River, less than a mile to the west of…
“It is the only way to end poverty,” says El Presidente. I look at the land below us and yearn for green and blue, instead of this ash gray, dust brown. A hazy sun. My eyes burn. I have not been home for going on two hundred days. This morning, I looked in the mirror…
translation by Owen Good It’s there. It’s gone. Both. Almost always. I didn’t go out for four days; I was inside the entire time. I stocked up on wine. At the time, I never considered that I shouldn’t, that I should do something to combat this; I forget resolutions I’d previously made…
They depart in the early morning hours in a rainstorm, and as they drive north the sheets of falling water turn to windblown snow. The client leads in an SUV with a couple of his employees; Jake follows in his own SUV, Reggie beside him. Despite the weather, the client presses the speed limit, 75…
He was late to pick me up at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport, my daddy. Back then, in 1998, before the escalation of terror scares, parents were pretty comfortable letting their kids fly by themselves under the care of the airline—at least, my mother was! I was a shivering blub by the time he arrived….
I was born some time in 1972, in a country I’ve never seen and to parents I’ve never known. When I was a few months old, I was left in the care of a stranger who will always remain a shadowy figure of inexplicable love in my imagination. At some point, this stranger handed me…
What you need to understand is this: Skeeter was really very fat. It would be impossible to tell this story without mentioning that fact. She would mention it herself once in a while, although in the past this would usually be in the midst of an altercation with her husband, who was not fat. “You’ve…
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