Fiction

In late afternoon I sit on the porch, which is mostly rotted to the ground. The screen door’s got cardboard laid in and the rock chimney leaks mortar like a pastry filling. The roof is more sky than shingle. At sixteen years old I wanted to be far away, and by seventeen I was long…

Most said the scout had discovered Rosa Dean buying toilet paper at the Super Thrifty. Some said she’d been at the Lucky Mart, while others said she’d been eating fried clams with her friends at McManahan’s Fish Fry. Of course the people of Apple Island, Massachusetts, had known about Rosa Dean’s beauty for years. They’d…

1st Johanna just wants to fuck baseball players. Baseball. She harbors no lust for the thunder boys of basketball. “Freaks of nature, glandular giants, scary,” she explains. “It’d be awful, like having sex with a kayak.” Football players don’t arouse her either. “God, no! Sadistic ogres. They should be out tolling cathedral bells or guarding…

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…

When they returned home that evening, the cat was outside. She hissed and bolted from the porch at their approach, not the least bit interested in going inside, where they had left her. The play they had seen had been by e. e. cummings, enacted entirely upon a stage floor slanted surreally towards the audience….