Fiction

There was an arms race in the desert. It was 2014, and teams were manufacturing weapons. They were stockpiling them and refurbishing old ones—building their systems as they retooled the war rooms with Ivy League hires and interns—spurred, it seemed, by an urgency that could only appear in the sudden loss of a shared understanding….

When Tayo Musa was awaiting execution, his primary emotion was surprise. He had not foreseen his life turning out this way—which is to say, ending this way. He was not a political person. He had joined the marches because his friends said they were about freedom. Mr. Musa liked the idea of freedom, and his…

Nick almost hit the boy. He’d been driving down Burns Avenue on his way to teach a class about a story in which a boy is hit by a car. His mind was empty, an unfamiliar vacuity that made the road—white line between lanes, hill plunging into curves and trees, truck in the rearview mirror—into…

Past 11:00 p.m., the video store was the only shining thing on the highway into the city. The cool, fluorescent light of Video Wonderland spilled into the parking lot; behind the glass storefront, you could see figures gesturing, pointing, moving in and out of view.  From outside, such scenes always look warm.  Inside, Maggie lay in…

“So this guy goes into a Stockholm bank and takes these four hostages, right?” Karl was talking and hoovering up his nasi lemak at the same time, an extraordinary performance he delivered every day at lunch. As a talker, he was peerless, with the baritone of a podcast host and the gullet of a woodchipper….

There was once a young couple whose daughter was born with a weak heart, and on the evening she turned three months old, her heart began to fail. As she lay still in her crib, her parents began to notice all the dreaded signs the doctors had predicted: labored breath, swelling, an unusual sleepiness that…

I don’t know what to do with my ghost in the city. It’s too familiar here, too sticky. The freight train clangs along outside. Flat car, coal car, oil car. I wondered if there were hoboes in trains anymore or if they had moved on to other transportation or if they had ever existed in…

The lake lies heavy and flat, like it’s pressed under glass. At dawn, a grey vapor creeps low across the water and disappears into the tangle of trees, like a predator going home to sleep. Once a week, I bail out the boat. This is my only chore. It gets so heavy with rainwater that…

Because of a headache it would turn out I only needed to sleep off, I hadn’t gone to school the day a car struck down Osbert Tetteh. Osbert was the boy I was closest to in class four. I was the girl he was closest to. That day, my mother had waited until ten a.m….