Fiction

It was the memory of Ms. Musavi’s arrogant eyebrows, rising up toward her chador like two sideways parentheses, that made Amir lift a hand to strike his twelve-year-old daughter for the first time. Amir and his wife, Seema, had never hit their children, not even a light slap of the hand when chubby fingers reached…

I was deep in my email when my son came up behind me at my desk. He had a question, I could tell. Still typing, I tilted my head his way. What name would you pick? he said. If you could pick a different name. For myself? He nodded. Well. I’ve always liked the name…

Then the Muhheconneok, people of the ever-flowing waters, are killed, or tricked, or forced east to Stockbridge. The land, hardly bought, is leased to Dutch tenant farmers who curse their lords when they find the spring fields full of stones. Some of the children survive, and some even live long enough to see the merchants…

Liv’s mother was eighty-nine when she got her hip replacement. A healthy eighty-nine. Minus the hip. Liv, who was fifty-eight, was also healthy. Minus nothing. Waiting for the surgery to be over, Liv wondered why she hadn’t brought something besides her phone to occupy her time. But she’d been busy with her mother, with tending…

“If the duck was a song bird, it would sound like this: nasal, desolate, the call of migratory things.” – Mr. Lies to Harper Pitt, Perestroika IV, Angels in America My sister Agatha Krishna said it started when they came, and that’s where you could put the blame. She said we had to go back….

Hardly anything was out of the ordinary when Esther first arrived. Not that time was in any hurry to slow down out here. Things were in their fairly expected state for this time of year—even if, though the calendar read October, the burner had been high underneath the day since before she’d left Chattanooga. By…

While my mother dozed, I sat in a chair by her bed, thinking about Wamblán, a jungle river town near the Nicaraguan border with Honduras, and about Jacinto, who thought this mole in the middle of my left hand was a stigmata. Jacinto commanded the small FSLN base in Wamblán, a sort of special forces…

When I was six and my uncle was twenty-four, he did something that you can’t do anymore—he took me to a racetrack across the river called Cahokia Downs. That was where I saw horses for the first time—it was 1955, and we didn’t have a television yet, so I never watched Roy Rogers or My…

She caught a glimpse of her eyes on the screen and felt they held the fact that she’d finally found the very thing the internet had been invented for, like she had arrived, and this was it. But it wasn’t; it was just that her eyes were wide from losing focus and watery from wear….