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…
The decision had been made the night before, though I’d played very little part in it. We’d been lying in bed and she’d said it had to be done. And because the day had been long and we were tired and a bit drunk, I thought it might not stick, and hoped it wouldn’t. It…
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…
Dixie Every year at the family reunion—before Cousin Monique comes to your rescue—the uncles sit back in their folding chairs and napkin-necks and ask about your father. They take you in with age-soggy eyes, as you stand before them in a floppy blouson and skirt. You look different now than you did in 1970 or…
(novel excerpt from Peace at Last) “M. Nobel, the reputed inventor of nitroglycerine, has been visiting this and the other copper mines for the purpose of introducing this powerful explosive agent. M. Nobel assured Captain Stevens that by this compound the great masses of copper, upon which gunpowder has no effect, can be sundered.” —Travel…
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…
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