Fiction

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…

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…