Fiction

The first couple of pounds were hard and I cried a lot; I wasn’t used to so little food. I had signed up at one of those clinics, spent a lot of money on diet soup, and got weighed in front of a bunch of other fat people so when I wanted to eat a…

Ever since the California economy collapsed, people have been coming to our street at night and going through the trash. That sounds worse than it is—I guess if it’s recyclable, then it’s not really trash. They sort through the blue bins that were wheeled out to the curb during the day by the gardening crews….

The spring I turned ten my father told me we’d be spending a month in Maine with old friends. “They have a daughter who’s a little older than you, Josh. And it’s time I taught you to fish,” he said. “You remember the Izelins, don’t you?” I didn’t, not exactly. They’d stayed with us for…

“You’re going to leave your watch on?” “You’re leaving on your cross?”

[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…

Here was my Wednesday ten o’clock: Robert James Coates, according to the file on my desk. But he refused to answer to that name, and at our first meeting, after the guard left us alone, insisted I call him Dog, which naturally I wouldn’t do. “All right, then, whatever, call me D,” he said agreeably,…

These two satisfied towns gaze at each other like old flames across Mobile Bay—handsome, hidebound Mobile with its lawyers and its cemeteries, and blithe Fairhope, pretty Fairhope, with its galleries and boutiques, Point Clear draped along the eastern shore like a string of pearls. Used to be, the right kind of Mobile family escaped to…

When Megan first moved to London, she lived in the top of a house at the top of Brixton Hill that seemed to her, all fresh and green and hopeful as she was, the very best place in the city. She had been staying in a thieves’ hostel near Victoria while she was looking for…