Fiction

Subramani knows there’s no getting around phoning Coleridge’s family now that he’s dead. She tastes the sour truth of it almost the moment the call informing her of his death disconnects, right after that little click like a scolding aunt, the receiver still dangling from her left hand while she examines the garden through the…

The only thing visibly wrong with her was her weight, which was tremendous. “I see you’re on the hunt,” he said, and waved her torn résumé in the air between them. (While the FedEx clerks were turned, he’d plucked it from recycling: something about the systolic din of printers emboldened him.) “You see right,” she…

Anchorage Mama is crying into the dryer again. If there weren’t always a load of towels or underwear to soak up the tears she leaves in that General Electric, it would’ve rusted out by now. Her readiest advice on any bad, dumb day is, “Just go on, honey, and have yourself a good cry”—confusing to…

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…

“It’s a dying art, you know.” Leopold says this to me as I am chopping up the chicken for the lions. I just grunt. I don’t see anything artistic about chopping up one hundred and fifty pounds of dead birds for three giant cats that always look at me like they are wondering what I…

1. She angled the camera for what she called the money shot: two attic eyebrow windows and a nose-shaped balcony off the second-floor master. If we squinted from the driveway, we could make out the mouth, the Dutch breakfast door that cut you in half at the stomach. The face of evil, the mother said, laughing, rubbing…

The pilot was talking about the most recent sighting of the wild man in the park. A dentist and her daughter had glimpsed him while on a camping trip. This glimpse had been fleeting and, mercifully, at a distance. He’d apparently not been wearing any pants. “No pants,” I said. “That’s right,” said the pilot….

Alex’s alley was better lit than the street. When she’d moved to San Diego several years before, Alex had started going for walks in the twilight hours, when the sun was dipping behind the trees but before it got too dark. In Chicago, she’d preferred to walk at night, when people were home from work…

Bants and I sit with the terriermen at The Bird in Hand pub on the eve of the trail hunt. It is Bants who wants to speak to them, but he will soon find out that terriermen are bad news. We squeeze ourselves, locally brewed beer in hand, around the corner table. The invitation is…