Fiction

I remembered that morning because I woke up to such dark. It was my mother who woke me, came into my room, and said I could help earn a little extra money now. She got me a job with her out at the hog farm. She was dressed in comfortable clothes, soft jogging clothes, and…

They flew her in from Sweden, and by God, she looked it. Youthful. Leggy. Blond. Eyes like polished stones and features sharp as an army knife. She’d volunteered. And for what? At first I didn’t know. I’d never been to the Galápagos. Hell, never been farther south than Tijuana. Livy and I had stumbled across…

I arrived on Lopez Island in late October. Earlier that year, my mother had died, and on the ferry crossing from Seattle, I found myself thinking of her. Alive, she had been like adverbs or the color blue, impossible to ignore. I’d hoped that in a new setting she might be less present. Instead, pieces…

Unpacking my suitcase, I realized, annoyed, that one of my green socks had been left behind at the beach. At the time, it must have fallen behind the pousada wardrobe,but by now, who knows if it hadn’t become a floor rag,a bag for screws, a flannel scrapto polish furniture? If it had been a jacket,…

“Today we would have been married twenty-five years,” he said, looking at me through the rearview mirror. I didn’t react: I had jumped into a taxi on Nove de Julho Avenue. The traffic was terrible; we spent half an hour traveling to Faria Lima, and arrived at Pinheiros Street, all in the most aseptic silence….

The husband of this couple sitting on the opposite side of the booth is his wife’s work friend, more or less, probably more. For sure more. Drew doesn’t want to be here at this Saturday night dinner. But his wife, Chloe, informed him, “It’ll be good for you.” “Good how?” he’d asked. She repeated, louder,…

One summer ago, Hadley had woken me in the night. She was beside me in bed, and her smooth fingertips tickled my ribs. Her mouth was open slightly, her warm breath dampening my neck, my jaw line. I had swum in the lake that day and not showered afterward, and I imagined my skin tasting…

I had never been on TV before, and didn’t even pull a comb through my hair before I came out to face the cameras. As soon as the light came on I smiled, then begged the abductor—rapist, murderer—to turn himself in. My smile a gash across my face, I pleaded with anyone who might have…

In Hellensburgh there was a slaughterhouse and a bank. The post office closed at noon. The high school had five teachers and my uncle, a teacher, was the football club coach. Many of the schoolboys, thick-legged and silent, took up jobs in the slaughterhouse when they turned fifteen. The money was good. The boys would…