Fiction

I don’t know what to do with my ghost in the city. It’s too familiar here, too sticky. The freight train clangs along outside. Flat car, coal car, oil car. I wondered if there were hoboes in trains anymore or if they had moved on to other transportation or if they had ever existed in…

The lake lies heavy and flat, like it’s pressed under glass. At dawn, a grey vapor creeps low across the water and disappears into the tangle of trees, like a predator going home to sleep. Once a week, I bail out the boat. This is my only chore. It gets so heavy with rainwater that…

Because of a headache it would turn out I only needed to sleep off, I hadn’t gone to school the day a car struck down Osbert Tetteh. Osbert was the boy I was closest to in class four. I was the girl he was closest to. That day, my mother had waited until ten a.m….

The fortnight’s visit that Audrey Dyer paid her old friend Dorothy Bly, conserved in twenty cabinets. The toilet After the plane and the Tube and the unfamiliar walk and grubbing around in the flowerpots until she’s found the key, Audrey needs a piss, and so the first part of the Bly household that she takes…

Back then, everybody smoked. I knew guys who could jump-start a Zippo lighter just by snapping their fingers. People smoked in restaurants, movie theaters, airplanes, trains, college classrooms, funeral homes. I’ve seen people smoking, chest deep, in swimming pools. Children smoked back then. Monkeys in roadside zoos smoked. In junior high school, we had a…

My brother—ever emotive, ever sentimental—did one of those 23andMe tests, which I had advised against, but that’s Harlan. Harlan and I are twins, extremely NOT identical—and were supposedly the product of donated sperm, plus a donated egg, which were combined and gestated in a surrogate mother. Three strangers, none of whom were our parents. We should have…

I It was possible, Mara discovered, for the smell of one place to cross oceans and airspace. One particular aroma—a drift of leather—had recently become a frequent guest, emerging for the first time in a long time on a cool July afternoon, as she sat on the balcony of her old flat in Bunga. It…

It is five in the morning in the worst of winter, and I wake up to a knock on the door (we bought the house last year, when everyone who could buy a house was buying a house, and were told to install a buzzer or a Ring or at least a peephole—everyone in the…

He was crawling across the field. Mostly big dirt clods—his son had plowed it clean about a week ago—made up the half section, a hundred and sixty acres. He figured he tripped a football field in. Back on the road, his son sat in the front seat of the truck, staring at his screen because…