My twin’s bomb was packed with glass and a virus. His skin grew wet and dark and wouldn’t heal. I stink like meat, he wrote when he could. When it was clear he wasn’t dying, the VA doctors called him a cosmetic fix. Skin grafts, reconstructive surgery. When he recovered enough to make jokes, he…
He said the sky is not blue or white or gray. It is the color of one septillion snowflakes falling to the ground. He said a septillion is one followed by twenty-four zeros. More zeros than you could ever write down in one sitting because you are an impatient child. An only child. A singularity,…
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, And it is by art that we live, if we do. —Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart I. Ora Fitz breakfasted on the terrace, her manner chaste, irreproachable. She scarcely inclined toward her food, showed small appetite and, afterward, dabbed her mouth with a pressed napkin, leaving…
Translated by Kari Dickson She has to get the asylum seeker back to the church. She found him wandering around in the woods behind the church, he’d had enough, he tried to tell her in a language she couldn’t understand, but she knew that was what he was trying to say, all the same; he…
In the morning, before we left, we presented my aunt with a gift from Indonesia, a package of luwak, one of four in Bon’s duffel. Civet coffee? she said, bemused. We were already savoring cups of coffee at her table, brewed in her coffee press from Arabica beans of her own supply. It’s an Indonesian…
No. 1. Keats reads to six in the village hall. ‘When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Twelve hands make…
Jim Carlyle drove down Glenmore’s main street looking for a parking spot in a manner that suggested he’d never burned out a clutch in sixty years of driving and wasn’t about to start now. He found a place and swung the Utility’s wheel so that he rolled in perfectly against the kerb. Nothing wrong with…
Translated by Angela Rodel The Runt had no luck with fathers at all. On the whole, nobody here had any luck with parents, but most of them were always crying for their mothers. The orphanage that they came from was itself called “Mother and Child” for some unknown reason. First, there were no mothers there….
Beth tried to reach her daughter first thing on Sunday morning. When her daughter didn’t answer the phone, a feeling of alarm arose and, like a weather balloon, kept sending Beth disquieting signals all day. Beth and Vanessa had a relationship marked by an almost occult sense of the other’s welfare. Over the years, mother…
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