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Janelle is my oldest friend, but the word “friend” is outdated.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…

“So this guy goes into a Stockholm bank and takes these four hostages, right?” Karl was talking and hoovering up his nasi lemak at the same time, an extraordinary performance he delivered every day at lunch. As a talker, he was peerless, with the baritone of a podcast host and the gullet of a woodchipper….

There was once a young couple whose daughter was born with a weak heart, and on the evening she turned three months old, her heart began to fail. As she lay still in her crib, her parents began to notice all the dreaded signs the doctors had predicted: labored breath, swelling, an unusual sleepiness that…

I don’t know what to do with my ghost in the city. It’s too familiar here, too sticky. The freight train clangs along outside. Flat car, coal car, oil car. I wondered if there were hoboes in trains anymore or if they had moved on to other transportation or if they had ever existed in…

The lake lies heavy and flat, like it’s pressed under glass. At dawn, a grey vapor creeps low across the water and disappears into the tangle of trees, like a predator going home to sleep. Once a week, I bail out the boat. This is my only chore. It gets so heavy with rainwater that…