I It was possible, Mara discovered, for the smell of one place to cross oceans and airspace. One particular aroma—a drift of leather—had recently become a frequent guest, emerging for the first time in a long time on a cool July afternoon, as she sat on the balcony of her old flat in Bunga. It…
It is five in the morning in the worst of winter, and I wake up to a knock on the door (we bought the house last year, when everyone who could buy a house was buying a house, and were told to install a buzzer or a Ring or at least a peephole—everyone in the…
The scam looks something like this: we offer you a piano (a concert pianist, elder statesman, has slipped this mortal coil; the piano just needs a home), the only cost being that we have to ship it to you. You know how pianos are—“unwieldy” an understatement—and so you’ll just cover the moving costs and we’ll…
What I wanted to do Saturday night was head to my crafts club meet-up at the Pride Center, one of the few queer spaces in Brooklyn where I could safely assume my craft-hating ex-girlfriend would not make an appearance. What I was compelled to do instead, per orders from my sister, Theresa, was attend my…
What you need to know about Havaldar is that he claims he can tame any animal—horses, feisty goats, guard dogs that keep barking fruitlessly into the night. But nothing is harder in the world than milking a newly calved cow. Everyone in town knows that. And so, when one cow proves to be particularly stubborn,…
Nick almost hit the boy. He’d been driving down Burns Avenue on his way to teach a class about a story in which a boy is hit by a car. His mind was empty, an unfamiliar vacuity that made the road—white line between lanes, hill plunging into curves and trees, truck in the rearview mirror—into…
Past 11:00 p.m., the video store was the only shining thing on the highway into the city. The cool, fluorescent light of Video Wonderland spilled into the parking lot; behind the glass storefront, you could see figures gesturing, pointing, moving in and out of view. From outside, such scenes always look warm. Inside, Maggie lay in…
“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…
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