Fiction

Chicago, April 18, 1994 Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else, with a little creature burrowed in my body, clawing at the walls inside my chest-a recurring nightmare. But I was awake, listening to the mizzle in my pillow, to the furniture furtively sagging, to the house creaking under the…

Dimitri and I are half-naked when the woman shows up with the dogs. He is sitting up and I am astride him, my dress around my waist. What we had thought to be a secluded park looking out on an all-but-abandoned pond is actually someone’s backyard. “We’re clean-living people here,” the woman says. Then the…

i. In the year that Johann Pike turned seventy he had been the Executive Director of the Chicago Antiquarian Society for over thirty years. His offices were housed, along with the rest of the Society, in Blackthorne Hall, which was located six blocks from the center of the University of Chicago, where Johann’s father had…

“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….