Mrs. Venkataraman had never seen a black man before. There they were in the arrival lounge at Murtala Muhammad Airport, with their coal-black skins and eyes, pawing through their passports, looking for the residence visas her husband’s university had obtained for them, shaking their heads and laughing loudly, saying Eh-hehn Eh-hehn over and over again….
A Romance Novel in Ten Short Chapters Chapter One One day—taken by the lilt of his wrists and the most beautiful hands she had ever seen on a man—she impetuously threw in her lot with a deaf and dumb mechanic who’d been deaf and dumb from birth. She fell in love as she was watching…
She is standing in the doorway of the barn loft, swaying backwards and forwards. Both her hands are over her head and flat against the inside of the lintel; her heels come off the floor on her forward motion, and she keeps her toes down on her backward motion, curling them around the rough…
I stood on Mr. Silvia’s porch with my last thirty-six dollars rolled in a rubber band tucked between breast and belly fat. I remembered the house from when I was a kid. Back then it was a gap-toothed barn where we played while birds flew in and out above us. Now it was a…
from House of Widows Like most men under the right circumstances, my father could walk on water. In fact, he did it often, and sometimes he took me along. Together we stood on the frozen whitecaps of Cape Ann looking back at the lights of our town on the Massachusetts north shore. Even half a…
The man I learn from drives us from carnival to carnival in a Chrysler hearse with a convertible top. In Futura Bold, it says Theobold’s Body Shop. He is a man in his mid-forties—trousers, all of expensive cotton; shirts of silk. He has a different pair of soft-leather boots for every day of the month….
On her first day at the American school, Glynnis’s class dissects earthworms. At her old school, the fourth graders dissected cow eyes that came delivered in a plastic jug. But here, the worms aren’t delivered. After lunch, the class has to find their own worms in the mud outside, then rinse them off under the…
There was a storm— Nearly seven years ago— Julia and Lucas, living in California, they didn’t live together. She lived in her space, he in his. Lucas was finishing a degree at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, biding time; they were going to move to L.A. soon and get a place together. She was…
a novel excerpt It was a long road which he walked, and as it was the end of the dry season it was hot and dusty, and the heat rose from the orange laterite soil in simmered waves. Along the road to Boda there were palm trees and ebony and mango and papaya trees,…
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