Fiction

Rochelle isn’t exactly sure where to start or what to Google. “Male prostitutes”? “Male escorts”? Do people still say “prostitutes” and “escorts”? She types “male sex workers” in the search bar. The results include a Wikipedia page; an Out magazine interview series on stigma in the industry; and a National Institutes of Health article, “Male Sex Workers:…

When Sima told me about it the first time, we were sitting on a bench in the small park near my dormitory, where the trees offered some relief from Tehran’s relentless summer heat. “It’s this thing where I crave stuff that isn’t food, like soil or chalk,” she explained, her eyes fixed on a patch…

Mappings for a Once and Future Landscape 1. Well, and here you are, uninvited, unwelcome, intruder, having come at last to prowl among my papers at my desk. I know you will have already searched for useful items. I have left you useful items. Others may have looted and left, but here you are, here you are…

The man they call her husband never married her and never asked about what she left behind in the old country—what or who. It does not matter. The past is behind her, across the Atlantic. Less than a week on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires, then a steamboat up the river to the landlocked…

They called her Little though she wasn’t anymore. She resembled her father, red-haired and tall. As a kid she’d been the one who hauled with him when his sternman didn’t show. Lobstering was a franker education than what she got at school. If you weren’t in the present, it came and found you. A bloodied…

The Local History project was a partner situation, and Oren was not surprised when he got Imogene Fraser. She was Mr. Serwer’s trusted ambassador, and he, the new student, was treated like a lost diplomat who barely spoke the language. They pulled topics out of a tupperware. Imogene let him do it, and he picked…

The HerbariumMay 1942 The greenhouse shimmers like a glass cathedral. A cedar waxwing alights from a nearby Oregon grape licked by flames of fern. The bird sails to the tip of the greenhouse’s back A, a lemon-bellied wick on a giant’s sunlit candle. Some of its feathers are dipped in red as if to seal a…

Her 8:30s are late, the first of the day. She waits out front, beneath the largest of the three dogwoods. It’s strange to be here, standing like this, pretending to have arrived a relative stranger to this house. But she’s been here her whole life, hasn’t she? Frosted branches hover and reach in the morning…

Restless, you find yourself in New York again. An unlikely place for your ghost to turn up, since during your time as a mortal, you were so unhappy here. Everyone knew it. Ten months and five social disasters later, you set sail for Spain, for Granada, vowing never to return to this godforsaken city. Yet,…