Fiction

Janelle is my oldest friend, but the word “friend” is outdated. We are sitting in a diner that smells of old oil and toxic cleaning solution. My personal chef prepared a salmon benedict an hour before we got on the road, which Janelle refused before plopping down on an antique divan and barely looking at…

Last week, unfortunately on one of the evenings when Haseeb was home in time for dinner with me and the children, the watchman informed us that Mariam had died. Haseeb was annoyed on two accounts: one, that Mariam’s brother was outside and demanded to speak to me; two, that I hadn’t listened to his advice…

She got off the train at Hudson and her father was there, tall and resigned, his long hands unraveling the brim of his sun hat as he held it in front of him. She had wondered if she would recognize him right away, but of course she did. The lines in his face had become…

There was an arms race in the desert. It was 2014, and teams were manufacturing weapons. They were stockpiling them and refurbishing old ones—building their systems as they retooled the war rooms with Ivy League hires and interns—spurred, it seemed, by an urgency that could only appear in the sudden loss of a shared understanding….

When Tayo Musa was awaiting execution, his primary emotion was surprise. He had not foreseen his life turning out this way—which is to say, ending this way. He was not a political person. He had joined the marches because his friends said they were about freedom. Mr. Musa liked the idea of freedom, and his…

Because of a headache it would turn out I only needed to sleep off, I hadn’t gone to school the day a car struck down Osbert Tetteh. Osbert was the boy I was closest to in class four. I was the girl he was closest to. That day, my mother had waited until ten a.m….

The fortnight’s visit that Audrey Dyer paid her old friend Dorothy Bly, conserved in twenty cabinets. The toilet After the plane and the Tube and the unfamiliar walk and grubbing around in the flowerpots until she’s found the key, Audrey needs a piss, and so the first part of the Bly household that she takes…

Back then, everybody smoked. I knew guys who could jump-start a Zippo lighter just by snapping their fingers. People smoked in restaurants, movie theaters, airplanes, trains, college classrooms, funeral homes. I’ve seen people smoking, chest deep, in swimming pools. Children smoked back then. Monkeys in roadside zoos smoked. In junior high school, we had a…

My brother—ever emotive, ever sentimental—did one of those 23andMe tests, which I had advised against, but that’s Harlan. Harlan and I are twins, extremely NOT identical—and were supposedly the product of donated sperm, plus a donated egg, which were combined and gestated in a surrogate mother. Three strangers, none of whom were our parents. We should have…