Fiction

  • Collectors

    I got involved with Gregg Evans Langley through my friend Xandy, a young mime artist I had befriended when we were teaching at Chautauqua once. Xandy phoned to tell me he’d met a guy at a Chelsea opening who had a weekend place near me and he’d given him my number. The only details Xandy…

  • Ghost

    Many years before Zhao lost her right arm, she had used that arm to slap her husband, Yue, in a public denunciation in Wantu. Her hand had hurt after the slap, tingling at her side as she stood and watched Yue kneel in the dunce hat, so that even now when she remembered the incident,…

  • What You Won’t Say

    From my stool behind the cash counter, I watch you through the window. Watch you double-park your Mercedes, turn the car off but leave the music system blasting hits from a time when your life was simpler: Anand, Mughal-e-Azam, Love in Simla. Cars swerve and honk, angry Queens drivers shoot curses as they whiz past….

  • Here I Am, Laughing with Boers

    One morning, I meet three Boers in the Pietersburg laundromat. It is a Saturday. I have half a load going—the full extent of my wardrobe—and I am reading a book called In the Heart of the Whore, a book about Boers, coincidentally. There are three of them, two guys and a girl—big primordial-looking people, red…

  • Confession (Solo 4.4)

    That morning a lamb was born. They’re born a lot and I’m used to it, but still, to hear that tiny bleating from the comfort of my bed. The mother was Cindy, a Katahdin hair sheep of some distinction, one of the older gals, not a nurture natural. I had to get up at three…

  • Adopting Sarajevo (Solo 4.3)

    “Let’s ask Dad to drive me. It’s not like he works full-time anymore. And he’s practically begging for our approval.” The fact that Frank had never taken Marina to the orthodontist made him no worse than any other man whose wife ran a corporation while never missing a kid’s appointment, and though the braces were…