Around ten years ago, in December, as the Mayan Long Count calendar appeared to begin another five-thousand-year cycle, Ian sat at a café drinking a succession of espressos. He had been anxiously waiting for something. For the end of days, for the aliens to come. The day rolled by uneventfully enough, and he decided to…
Families have certain things they believe in and things they don’t believe in. Certain rules they live by. My family didn’t believe in nail clippers. In fact, I didn’t know about nail clippers until I was in my late twenties, some years ago. My husband came into the bathroom while I was cutting my toenails…
After you betray him, you will try to explain yourself. You will sit at his computer, the one he fell into and never returned, and you will stare at the screen inches from your face, but your fingertips will hover above the very keyboard he could never leave and you will feel like the woman…
My husband’s sister calls at mealtimes. Paul leaves the table and takes the call in the study, even if we’ve just sat down to dinner. At one time I would have waited for him—ten minutes or an hour, however long it took Tara to outline the parameters of her latest calamity. Tonight I keep eating….
Right away, Raj could tell Rupa apart from the other passengers. Even though he’d encouraged his mother to send her in American travel gear, she’d arrived in a homespun sari that looked like a hand-me-down, beleaguered and wrinkled as it was from the long journey. She clasped her hands together in greeting and tried to…
1 And this will be her, a lonely woman on the threshold of the ocean. Early morning and the tall waves will break in black and white and mauve. Quickly, she will bury her dress in the sand so it won’t blow away. She will feel her body acutely aching from the night before,…
Rosemarie knew the flight would be long and difficult—nineteen hours from New York to Buenos Aires—but she’d thought that she’d made all the necessary preparations. None of them seemed to be of much use, though: the special horseshoe-shaped pillow, melatonin, the relaxation app, not eating the airline food, and drinking only water. She’d made herself…
Shea sees the tent from a long way off before she decides it is a tent. The shape is all wrong, figures outside in arterial-red rain gear—movements too breathy. The red matches the red of the tent, popping against the gray-green of the mountains. A giant, globed, spherical cloud hovers just behind them in the…
The encounter I am about to describe took place in October or November of 1990, late at night, during an Amtrak trip from Chicago to Ann Arbor. On that route in those days, it was not uncommon for trains to make unexplained stops miles from the nearest town, then sit for hours. For the most…
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