The night before he left for basic training, Ebo had one last pigeon to kill—a cream barred homer from the old line of Stichelbaut. The bird was from a long strain of impressive racers, a gift from his mother when he was nine years old. Ebo had put off killing this bird, his favorite, by…
The Twerp’s new record has been playing for hours, but it seems like days. It seems like it’s been playing his whole life. His ears have turned red from excitement. It has that sound, the one he has been describing his whole life. In this room of rooms, the walls have walls and he lingers…
Kyle Waller was retired from his job at InvoTech for exactly twenty business days when he found himself crouched at the helm of an old fishing boat, sputtering across the jade skin of the Mopan River in Belize. The boy Oscar was at the stern, manning the rudder while the woman from Florida and her…
The first time I saw Kemi she was causing a scene. Everyone stopped to watch—the boarding house staff, the students they were checking in, and the parents carrying luggage into the hostels. In front of the hostels, in the open space where cars were parked, a woman stood by the back door of a shiny…
The other night at a party in Westlake Hills, just outside of Austin, I stepped outside to get some air and found a group of my old friends sitting around a fire pit in the backyard, smoking cigarettes. It was a strange sight, not only because I hadn’t seen most of these people in several…
We woke to a world opened up in holes, a dawn still stained with spots of night. Stoking the stove, we stood, went to the window, blew out the lamp to better see: out there, beneath the barely brightening sky, the snow-smooth pasture somehow gone guttate while we slept. Letting out the dog, we lingered…
Russell woke, his mouth dry and sour with fear. His back ached and his hands were stiff, raw, the blood swelling in his knuckles like he was young again, fighting again. A warm wind came from the window, pure and solitary-smelling in the way of predawn hours. And he could smell the jasmine that Alice…
When she arrived at Grisha’s, Marina heard the fierce sound of clanging cookware. This meant Aneta was angry. These days, Aneta was always angry. To hear her tell it, she hated being a home attendant, detested old people and their smell, found Grisha a dissolute lecher and couldn’t stand dirty Brooklyn sidewalks. Their employer, VIP…
It took three weeks for Gwaza to disintegrate. Even after he was gone, his smell carried in a thick veil of flies, keeping the house door shut and all the windows closed. People walking by on their way to Church carrying gossip, or back from work with roadside onions and Friday night Chicken Licken stopped…
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