Fiction

The man they call her husband never married her and never asked about what she left behind in the old country—what or who. It does not matter. The past is behind her, across the Atlantic. Less than a week on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires, then a steamboat up the river to the landlocked…

They called her Little though she wasn’t anymore. She resembled her father, red-haired and tall. As a kid she’d been the one who hauled with him when his sternman didn’t show. Lobstering was a franker education than what she got at school. If you weren’t in the present, it came and found you. A bloodied…

The Local History project was a partner situation, and Oren was not surprised when he got Imogene Fraser. She was Mr. Serwer’s trusted ambassador, and he, the new student, was treated like a lost diplomat who barely spoke the language. They pulled topics out of a tupperware. Imogene let him do it, and he picked…

The HerbariumMay 1942 The greenhouse shimmers like a glass cathedral. A cedar waxwing alights from a nearby Oregon grape licked by flames of fern. The bird sails to the tip of the greenhouse’s back A, a lemon-bellied wick on a giant’s sunlit candle. Some of its feathers are dipped in red as if to seal a…

The Premise I had graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from a fine Ivy League university, and I was looking for a job. The bills were piled on the right-hand side of my desk, and the ads for employment positions on the left-hand side. The bill pile was higher by a…

Her sister loved pepper on everything. Just a little bit more, she’d say, while the waiter stood there, resentful and impatient, twisting the cumbersome wooden mill over and over again, waiting to be released. For Anna, pepper was a take-it-or-leave it spice. Anna loved salt. She loved everything about it: its purity, its texture—the way…

I. In the women’s hospital, past the arch of glass and stone, a grand piano played day and night. All the presidents and the vice presidents loved it. The parking attendants hated it. The rest of the hospital—the doctors and the nurses, the physician assistants and the scrub techs, the billers and the coders, the…

When I started my summer internship at Bible House, I was assigned to the Kids’ Corner exhibits even though I told them up front I didn’t have a heart for children. I hadn’t liked kids much even when I was one myself. Growing up had been a relief. The supervisors at Bible House see a…

Translated from the Hungarian by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess1 What he noticed at first were white areas here and there on the wall between pictures. There were no replacements, nor did they rearrange the paintings, as if the bare spaces didn’t bother them. Even though the boy remembered that they used to move them…