Fiction

1 September There was nothing outside our town to warn you of its coming. One second you weren’t there and the next you were. It was more than a post office and more than a village, but it had no sprawl, it had no outskirts. The town huddled close together for protection, the desert everyone…

"At last," my husband said, when I had locked up for the night and come to bed. "You knew I would," I said. "But I didn’t know when." Propped up in the recently rented hospital bed, he peered more closely at my chosen book. A novel by Patrick O’Brian. "Wait, no, no," he said. "You…

I was in the kitchen when the FBI arrived. I had no idea who they were at first. Just two guys coming up the front walk. I felt the Watch Tower heading my way, I sensed conversion, vacuum cleaners, rubbery soap in small plastic buckets that could clean anything yet protect the surface. I threw…

i. My wife, Rita, has been having these dreams in which relatives arbitrarily appear and either ask her to get inside something—a car, a slowly moving train, a brightly lit room that seems unattached to any larger structure—or implore her to let them enter a room or some other place, fixed or moveable (an elevator,…

My aunt Leticia could be counted on to explain the family mysteries. She’d forget I didn’t know something and drop it into conversation, or use the occasion of having a fever—or being ill in any way—to let down her defenses and tell me things I hadn’t been told. Sometimes the words flew out of her…

There were a bunch of us who had drawn together into a corner of the dining room. It was a big party, and none of us had met before. But a tiny core of women of a certain age had drawn more women until there were enough of us that we needed to be democratic…

The shepherd is perched on a stile, one eye on his paper, one eye on the lane below the ffridd, the meadow, beyond the flock. His dogs lie at his feet, their heads between their paws, panting softly in the unseasonably warm May weather and batting their ears occasionally at the horseflies attracted to the…

I begin to see the possibilities in dehydration just about now. Dehydration-a tantalizing word. Fog without moisture, space without stars or solar magnificence. Somewhere hidden are heaps of stone our guide found last week and, in our group’s wandering about, lost again. An effluvium of dust has hung over us for two months now, almost…

When Pia walks into his flat in Bombay, she thinks it’s a joke. She looks up at Adil, the man she has agreed to marry, waiting for him to ask the rightful occupant of this miniature box to step out of his hiding place. "So what do you think?" he says, mistaking her smile for…