The other camels hobbled nearby snort and chuff and in general make a lot of noise betwixt them. Though they are called ships of the desert, these camels are nothing like our fishing boats. They are good for milk and their turds are spectacularly fire-worthy. But none of us have yet figured out how to…
Say what you will about the patient in twelve: to me he was not an exceptional case. None of them were. Strictly speaking it is never the dying who are exceptional, for the dead will always outnumber the living. It is we who are the imperiled minority—we who plod on alone in the shadow of…
For breakfast, Jake takes six plastic vitamin bottles out of the cupboard and empties one of each onto the counter: iron, B-12, zinc, C, E, and a multi for good measure. He yawns, lines the tablets up on his hand, takes a diet Mountain Dew from the refrigerator, and washes them down in a single…
I remember, most vividly, the tea my mother used to dye her auburn hair, the soup of crushed marigolds, rose hips, and paprika. It was crimson, like the blood that drips from Pete and Willow’s goats this morning, young wethers with slit throats strung up on a clothesline. I’m busy enough to look away, forget…
Irish Maupin, immobile again in her old city, in a tearoom with white linens, sat fatter than she’d ever been, fatter than anyone had ever been in the history of recording such things. Faint from eating too little too fast, she found in a ruffle of her collar a sliver of candied grapefruit peel. She…
This nighttime beach is suddenly a sandy stage, and we’re blinking at our audience in their spotlight: two guys in a speedboat trolling for castaways. Everyone comes out of their stupor quicker than me. Candi chants “S.O.S., S.O.S.” and the others yell “Woo-hoo!” and “Yeah!” as if they’re at a concert. I’m the only one…
The woman having a miscarriage bumps into the woman getting an abortion. It is New Year’s Eve. They are both in line at the pharmacy, buying ibuprofen. One carries a basket holding a bottle of wine, the other four candy bars. There are many people ahead of them. “Those look good,” says the first, glancing…
The Sahara it is not. At night, the little tourist caravan arrives at a wave of dunes cresting beneath the starry sky. But during the day, they carry on through splotches of the unvaried scrub that is Rajasthan’s Thar. Trees are occasional, of a variety that gives the camels gas and causes them to slobber…
She doesn’t know which aspect of the piece makes her want to become part of the space of the room—the midnight safety of the gathered sheet, pulled up at one corner to protect, to comfort, to block the light so white, to be sucked on around saliva-wet fingers, to hide; or the white light of…
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