Fiction

[Editor’s Note: Clicking on the number for each footnote in the main body of the text will take you to the relevant note. After reading the footnote, please click on the number to the left of the footnote text to return to the section of the story you were reading.]   Winston Hall-Miles Worked as…

I recently went to an appointment with a terrorist I used to know. He lives near me in New York City, and when he wrote me a letter that said Dear Sashi, come and see me, without thinking very much about it, I did. Even when I was a little girl in Sri Lanka, before…

“What’s wrong with Vanderbilt? Not that she’d get in necessarily,” Mrs. Holtzmann said to no one in particular. “There are plenty of good schools in the South.” She stood in the doorway of her classroom with her arms crossed. “Heil Holtzmann,” Audrey said under her breath. It was Monday. She was kneeling at her locker…

My mom says my dad had to work so hard he didn’t really notice how angry it made him. Nowadays he can’t watch the news without losing his temper. He comes from country people who hated the government going all the way back to the revolution. My mom says my dad’s grandfather used to talk…

After the death of his wife, Loring began giving away things for free. His sister-in-law worried it was some kind of “suicide thing,” as his brother Bill put it, which only showed how little they knew him. Loring wasn’t suicidal. If anything, in the four months since Gloria died, there was a new kind of…

Sadie’s lover, Marcus, called her every Thursday from Chicago as he drove to and from marriage counseling. (His wife drove separately, it goes without saying.) The end result of this was that it felt as if the three of them were in counseling together, but Sadie sort of liked that. The reason Marcus had to…

So when the doctor pulls the camera tube out of my rectum, the old joke comes to mind. “Wrecked ’em?” I say. “I slayed ’em!” The nurse lets herself out, carrying a fresh cut of me between two little panes of glass. The doctor rewards me with a snort, but I can see he’s only…

Out back of the motel, a man and a boy feed alligators in the dark. I can see them past the curtains. Past the paisley curtains and through the cracked and dirty pane of glass, I see them, like shadows, see them and the slow, casting motions they make. I see things leave their hands,…

Alan Zimmer had been staying at the Kirschbergs’ for a week when he saw their daughter in the elevator at Brigham and Women’s. She was in a wheelchair. Alan, behind her, recognized the yellow kinks of her hair, and the dark roots that cleaved to her part. He stepped forward. “Jenna! What are you doing…