Fiction

for Dr. NCB I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. —from “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Langston Hughes She took her time, walking like a fawn, careful not to make a twig snap. It was getting dark, but she could still see plenty. The voice grew and rose, and was the color of mint, like what…

The swimming pool was empty because there was a crack in its side that needed to be patched, so Emma used it as a hideout when she wanted to get high. Bundled up in her purple down parka and a pair of silver Uggs, she would squat on the cement near a moldy accumulation of…

The sun hadn’t been up an hour when Angelina and Pablo Ramos tiptoed into the surf at Miami Beach, he sporting his ridiculous plastic nose guard, she in a petaled bathing cap, the rubber strap tight against her chin. The only sound besides the gentle wash of the tide was the fluttering of two seagulls…

The day Judy had kittens, Carl Bernstein came to my house. The veterinarian had called it a hysterical pregnancy. Sometimes a cat will think she is pregnant and bloat up, but it’s all in her head. The vet was so definite about this. Two of the kittens were white and one was a calico. Carl…

I’m fourteen and I ride a silver bike with knobby tires through a suburban landscape filled with cul-de-sacs. Fast as a mongoose. Jeans that grip my thighs and ankles. Checkered sneakers. Black turtleneck and a puffy, emergency-colored vest. The air smells like firewood because every house has a chimney and every chimney is burning. I…

Every month, there were two or three phone queries like this one. Someone had bought a Monet at a yard sale in Weaverville or found a Grecian urn in a woodshed. One deranged caller claimed he’d discovered the missing arms of the Venus de Milo. Others wanted him to evaluate folk art, hoping some elderly…

Mornings while I brush my teeth I lay my four-month-old daughter on a towel on the floor of our glassed-in shower, safe and clean. The shower is tiled in button mushroom travertine and features a rainfall fixture and adjustable body sprays. My baby’s cry is a plaintive hollow sound in there. After I birthed her,…

Translated from the Chinese by Ting Wang Upon returning home, the first things my auntie saw were two big speckled roosters encircled by net bags. One squatting, the other standing, both appeared fairly sagacious. Once she spotted the roosters, Auntie knew my cousin was back. She looked carefully at the ground—maybe the roosters had good…

No, no, no—that’s not how it goes. I’m putting too many words in. Start again. I should tell it so that it begins with silence, with snow, show you the frozen speckle-strewn fawn I found at wood’s edge behind the cabin’s bark-stripped walls. I should tell it so that a six-year-old can understand because that’s…