Fiction

Jane and Evan moved to a small city in eastern Ohio and rented an old house on half an acre surrounded by a stone wall. Jobs came easily to them. People could see by their open and unlined faces that something good was happening in their lives. Evan went to work for an insurance agency,…

Nicky licks my eyelids. He pins me down and licks my eyelids. You should hear what boys call me always looking for the tongue in my mouth because my lips are the only place on me with any fat like maybe once they got bit. I’m a small town so up go my fists and…

The first thing she finds is a hand. In the beginning, she thinks it’s a tangle of sheet or a wadded sock caught between the mattress cover and the mattress, a bump the size of a walnut but softer, more yielding. She feels it as she’s lying, lazing, in bed. Often, lately, her body keeps…

Thank you, beautiful,” I said as my six-year-old daughter, Maude, came skipping over from the swings to hand me a warm, wilted bouquet of dandelions. Dandelions, the only flowers no one cares if you pick. Maude smiled at me, then turned and ran screaming back to the playground. “Stop,” she called as she ran, her…

I. The City How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations! She who was queen among the provinces has now become a slave. -Jeremiah, Lamentations 1:1 Manila suffered during the war. How many times have I heard this? There are…

Harris was walking his usual route to work, up Beacon Street and past the State House, when half a block ahead he saw their stolen car stopped at a red light. It was their missing car, all right-a white ’94 Honda Accord, license plate 432 dog, easy to remember-and it was still pumping out pale…

Alice Leung has discovered the secrets of bats: how they see without seeing, how they own darkness, as we own light. She walks the halls with a black headband across her eyes, keening a high C- cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat-never once veering off course, as if drawn by an invisible thread. Echolocation, she…

In our battle against the Beatles, it was my uncle Willie who threw the first punch, and for that, he said, he should have been knighted. I didn’t argue. We fought them in 1966, the year they played Araneta Coliseum in Manila, to a crowd of over one hundred thousand people. Their visit was quick;…

In August, the summer after her ninth-grade year, the girl-pudgy, moonfaced, with dull brown hair and new breasts-met the man who became her first husband. Before that, she’d been seeing a tall boy she danced with at junior high graduation, starting with a concentric-circle wheel-dance the chaperons employed to pull the boys and girls from…