Fiction

What you need to know about Havaldar is that he claims he can tame any animal—horses, feisty goats, guard dogs that keep barking fruitlessly into the night. But nothing is harder in the world than milking a newly calved cow. Everyone in town knows that. And so, when one cow proves to be particularly stubborn,…

Nick almost hit the boy. He’d been driving down Burns Avenue on his way to teach a class about a story in which a boy is hit by a car. His mind was empty, an unfamiliar vacuity that made the road—white line between lanes, hill plunging into curves and trees, truck in the rearview mirror—into…

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…

Then the Muhheconneok, people of the ever-flowing waters, are killed, or tricked, or forced east to Stockbridge. The land, hardly bought, is leased to Dutch tenant farmers who curse their lords when they find the spring fields full of stones. Some of the children survive, and some even live long enough to see the merchants…

Liv’s mother was eighty-nine when she got her hip replacement. A healthy eighty-nine. Minus the hip. Liv, who was fifty-eight, was also healthy. Minus nothing. Waiting for the surgery to be over, Liv wondered why she hadn’t brought something besides her phone to occupy her time. But she’d been busy with her mother, with tending…

“If the duck was a song bird, it would sound like this: nasal, desolate, the call of migratory things.” – Mr. Lies to Harper Pitt, Perestroika IV, Angels in America My sister Agatha Krishna said it started when they came, and that’s where you could put the blame. She said we had to go back….

Hardly anything was out of the ordinary when Esther first arrived. Not that time was in any hurry to slow down out here. Things were in their fairly expected state for this time of year—even if, though the calendar read October, the burner had been high underneath the day since before she’d left Chattanooga. By…

While my mother dozed, I sat in a chair by her bed, thinking about Wamblán, a jungle river town near the Nicaraguan border with Honduras, and about Jacinto, who thought this mole in the middle of my left hand was a stigmata. Jacinto commanded the small FSLN base in Wamblán, a sort of special forces…

When I was six and my uncle was twenty-four, he did something that you can’t do anymore—he took me to a racetrack across the river called Cahokia Downs. That was where I saw horses for the first time—it was 1955, and we didn’t have a television yet, so I never watched Roy Rogers or My…