Fiction

Flicking her IV line out of the way with the same movement she would use to shoo a fly, Maria Crowley opens the King Arthur Flour Baker’s Catalogue while the new visiting nurse makes herself at home. This one’s name is Corrine, or maybe it is Doreen; she wears Spandex and polyester in icy greens…

". . . moths hear sounds through their wings." "Moths require only three things to survive and breed: food, shade, and privacy." "Moths don’t eat wool . . . Only the larval form of the moths are wool eaters." There are over ten thousand five hundred identified species of moths in North America alone. When…

  First, her name was Jane, and if that wasn’t bad enough, one day, while she was sitting in the dining hall and drawing her trademark Jews—tiny cartoon men with beards and wisdom who decorated the edge of all her notebooks—the men got up off the page, shimmied down a table leg, and bused her…

When she left in the mornings, her husband and baby were still asleep. It was four o’clock, black and silent, a time when it felt illegal to be awake. She laid her clothes out the night before so she could dress in the dark, just jeans and a sweatshirt, sneakers and socks. And earrings—though no…

from Inheritance When she was thirty-four, no longer a young woman, my grandmother Chanyi crossed West Lake to see a fortuneteller. She didn’t tell my grandfather; she wished to keep her fate a secret. Perhaps her years of married life had deepened her need for privacy. “You come along, Junan,” she told my mother. “She’ll…

The mute boy was dragging the great stalled clock from his father’s study to the trash heap that smoldered at the edge of the woods when an old man with a stick chased him. Back when the boy’s father was alive, he’d tried to console his son, and maybe himself as well, by telling him…

Helen Swann shivers in shirtsleeves at the bus stop, coatless and confident the day will warm. The city bus, as it lumbers toward her, cracks the ice that lines the gutter. Frost nubs its broad, bald forehead and clouds the immense windshield. Like glaucoma, Helen thinks. It’s one of the old buses, which means the…

  [postcard text] I am awfully fond of this garden. How pretty are those plants & flowers! There is a grotto in this garden I was afraid to enter as it is too dark there, but at last decided. It is full of passages, the water runs over the walls outside. With best wishes Yours…

The ashtray was given as a wedding present to the young couple who later grew unhappy and died, but that was not the fault of any inanimate object. Made from crystal cut into pleasing shapes, it was held aloft by the bride, Flora, the day after the wedding. Already she thought she could see the…