Fiction

“All this,” said Wayne the plumber, “was written down in the Bible five thousand years ago.” He was out on the deck taking a break from doing angioplasty on the pipes beneath my kitchen sink. Meanwhile, he was giving his assistant, John Pickles, a lesson. “Hey, Wayne,” I yelled from an upstairs window, “you’re wrong…

At two o’clock in the morning, no one is to blame. We’d been watching CNN, one scene of disaster leading to the next, the reporter in front of what might have been a new anthrax outbreak giving way to the military analyst in the studio with new developments in Kabul, when William put his hand…

My whole life, it always made me crazy when people weren’t sensible. Dancers, for instance, have the worst eating habits. I can’t begin to say how many anorexic little girls I used to have to hold up onstage, afraid they were going to faint on me any minute. I myself was lean and tight and…

Priscilla’s father comes to visit unannounced and buys her golf shoes, tight Guess? jeans, and a steak, medium rare. She pushes the pink plastic “medium rare” marker into the coin pocket of her jeans and forgets about it until the day after he dies, several months later, when she will find the thing on the…

translated by Jay Rubin Junko was watching television when the phone rang a few minutes before midnight. Keisuke sat in the corner of the room wearing headphones, eyes half-closed, head swinging back and forth as his long fingers flew over the strings of his electric guitar. He was practicing a fast passage and obviously had…

Late night in early winter. The last hour of the long drive home. I tend to the thermostat, keeping the car warm enough for my sleeping family, but not so warm that my focus turns dull. Beyond the chilled glass to my left, green dashboard lights angle up toward the stars. Distance defines our relations….

The time Anne left her husband, she went to France. She spent the first few days in Paris at an inexpensive hotel in the sixth arrondissement on rue Jacob. Her room was small and sparsely furnished; the bathroom, too, was small, the shower produced a tepid trickle. Instead of looking out onto the busy street,…

This was just before my thirtieth birthday. I was in graduate school, of all places. I had no idea why. None of us did. We were extremely well-spoken rubber duckies. You could push us in any one direction, and we would flounder on forever. Sometimes, in the drowsy winter hallways, my conscience would rear up…

That’s how it starts, with the trash. Someone is swapping the trash, silently and insidiously, all over town. On the Promenade des Aubes, the rich lift the lids of their silvery pails and find used Pampers stuffed into empty boxes of Hamburger Helper; well-bred aunts hold up low-watt bulbs and shake them gingerly, as if…