Fiction

In the days before the wedding, as caterers and florists and seamstresses and bakers and even sommeliers and fromagers and charcutiers made appearances at the Maison ClosDennis, there were two of us who were irrelevant to the preparation of the proceedings. One of them, and this anyone could have predicted, was me, the boyfriend of…

It’s been a month now she’s been tutoring a dead girl on Park Avenue. She says as much into her cell. She’s walking fast to the subway so she won’t be late—she has to take three trains. “We’re doing vocab. Great Expectations.” “What’s that?” her mom says. “A blond girl? Does her hair color matter?”…

Even in this broken country, the women wanted to go shopping. The men arranged to have a guide from the hotel take their wives into town. The men were used to indulging the wives; the wives were used to being indulged; everyone was used to everyone else’s behaving in agreement with generally held, old-country expectations….

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…

When the camp director introduces God, he reminds us the man is just an actor. “His real name is Frank Collins,” the director says. “He lives in Knoxville and has a wife and three grown-up children.” He looks down at the little kids on the benches up front. “I want to make sure you know…

The first time it happened he assumed something had crawled into her fur—a hornet, maybe, or a spider (it was a chill day in October, so it might have been seeking warmth)—or that the dog had somehow lodged a shard of glass in her hair while rolling in the dirt. He’d been sitting in the…

Fourteen days patrol, the Colonel had ordered, but the men had already sold most of their ammunition on the Mandalay black market and had no intention of fighting even if they hadn’t, so they headed into the hills instead. Think of it as a camping trip, Mya Aung suggested to the others. * They crossed…