Fiction

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…

Because he could not afford to bury her, Wilson was still living with his mother. On the whole, though, his luck was holding. It was winter. The power company had shut off the electricity, removing any temptation he might have had to turn on the heat. He slept, or tried to sleep, in the corduroy…

On a good day, surgery lasts three minutes or less. Today’s takes longer. Kathryn has an audience. They don’t touch the fish at this point—they try to handle them as little as possible—but for the girl, Kathryn makes an exception. She wets her hand in a clear plastic bucket and lifts the stunned fish from…

Derek moved into the attic in August, and suddenly there were guns in Lucy’s house. Two: a rifle and a shotgun. There was a difference between them, Lucy had learned, though they looked the same to her, both dark-wooded and smoothly tarnished, antique-y, as if they belonged above a mantelpiece instead of propped up in…

It takes real skill to speed down the packed streets of Zhongguancun, but the singer with the mohawk is handling it like a pro. His asymmetrical spikes are poking the roof of his dad’s sedan, so he’s compensating by tilting his head slightly to the left. We are meeting with a new band to talk…

Now and again I get a whiff of something, the uneasy stillness before a hard and fast rain, and I can almost remember before, when I first moved in and the world was not yet fixed concretely beyond the edges of my skin. Poverty was novel then, even briefly thrilling and romantic, and it was…

Roy and Jimmy Boyle were shooting pool on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Lucky’s El Paso when Mooney Yost, a Lucky’s regular, came in and sat down on a bench near the boys’ table. Yost was about fifty years old, a fin and a sawbuck hustler who was always kind to Roy and his friends….