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…
Sometimes I looked over at who I was married to forever. She was on her side of the bed, me on mine. It’ll hit you now and then, this feeling. I got up for work, and she said, “What’s your problem?” But she didn’t want to know. I was throwing boxes for UPS. They hired…
OK, it bore mention: she’d slept with the guy once, more out of politeness than anything else. This was up in Montreal the previous winter. She and Theo Mirsky, the man who signed her paychecks, were working their way back from dinner with investors at a distinguished, much revered, but otherwise not very good brasserie…
Ben was late for school pickup; Wednesday was Diana’s day, but he’d forgotten that she had a meeting at the university until she texted him just after 3:00. When he picked Olivia up on time, he had to wait in a long line of cars until one of the teachers checked his dashboard sign, then…
On his morning walk to the record store, Glen came across a copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul sitting by itself in a box marked “free.” Glen wasn’t entirely certain what the book was about; he knew it was a self-help-type deal, don’t-forget-to-see-the-forest-for-the-trees and all that shit, probably; but he had either forgotten the…
I Whoever it was that hurt you, let me hurt them. Darkness had begun to fall by the time we reached Onekama. Kimia slowed the rental car—a bright red Chevy Volt that seemed to be made entirely of plastic—and peered out the window. The look in her brown eyes was as if she’d forgotten if…
While our apartment hovered on the brink of a four-sided civil war over a miraculous microwave I’d bought at a flea market in Fremont, my little brother’s best friend, Ricky Daddy, tried to live off the food given out at student-body meetings on campus. Monday it was the PSA, Tuesday the ASA, Wednesday the PSU,…
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