Fiction

It is five in the morning in the worst of winter, and I wake up to a knock on the door (we bought the house last year, when everyone who could buy a house was buying a house, and were told to install a buzzer or a Ring or at least a peephole—everyone in the…

The scam looks something like this: we offer you a piano (a concert pianist, elder statesman, has slipped this mortal coil; the piano just needs a home), the only cost being that we have to ship it to you. You know how pianos are—“unwieldy” an understatement—and so you’ll just cover the moving costs and we’ll…

He was crawling across the field. Mostly big dirt clods—his son had plowed it clean about a week ago—made up the half section, a hundred and sixty acres. He figured he tripped a football field in. Back on the road, his son sat in the front seat of the truck, staring at his screen because…

It was the memory of Ms. Musavi’s arrogant eyebrows, rising up toward her chador like two sideways parentheses, that made Amir lift a hand to strike his twelve-year-old daughter for the first time. Amir and his wife, Seema, had never hit their children, not even a light slap of the hand when chubby fingers reached…

I was deep in my email when my son came up behind me at my desk. He had a question, I could tell. Still typing, I tilted my head his way. What name would you pick? he said. If you could pick a different name. For myself? He nodded. Well. I’ve always liked the name…

Then the Muhheconneok, people of the ever-flowing waters, are killed, or tricked, or forced east to Stockbridge. The land, hardly bought, is leased to Dutch tenant farmers who curse their lords when they find the spring fields full of stones. Some of the children survive, and some even live long enough to see the merchants…

Liv’s mother was eighty-nine when she got her hip replacement. A healthy eighty-nine. Minus the hip. Liv, who was fifty-eight, was also healthy. Minus nothing. Waiting for the surgery to be over, Liv wondered why she hadn’t brought something besides her phone to occupy her time. But she’d been busy with her mother, with tending…

“If the duck was a song bird, it would sound like this: nasal, desolate, the call of migratory things.” – Mr. Lies to Harper Pitt, Perestroika IV, Angels in America My sister Agatha Krishna said it started when they came, and that’s where you could put the blame. She said we had to go back….

Hardly anything was out of the ordinary when Esther first arrived. Not that time was in any hurry to slow down out here. Things were in their fairly expected state for this time of year—even if, though the calendar read October, the burner had been high underneath the day since before she’d left Chattanooga. By…