Fiction

Birthmates

This was what responsibility meant in a dinosaur industry, toward the end of yet another quarter of bad-to-worse news: You called the travel agent back, and even though there was indeed an economy room in the hotel where the conference was being held, a room overlooking the cooling towers, you asked if there wasn’t something…

Brazil

It is my birthday, my twentieth birthday, and I’m in the bar of one of the Art Deco hotels on the beach when I meet her. They are always using this hotel on Miami Vice, although they are careful to take tight shots of the pink front and not show the bums and junkies down…

Peaches and Plums

The father took the children for long walks on Sundays because he imagined they shared his enthusiasm for the flat fields of the Beauce in summer, with the light clouds drifting across a pale sun, the hawthorn hedges flecked with fragile white flowers, and the edges of the wheat stained with red poppies. But the…

The Taxidermist

April Owen shows up at my flat around midnight. He doesn’t knock, but I spot him waiting in lurk beyond the screen door. Outside, the rain jumps like pixies on the floodlit blacktop. His hair is soaked and his boots are muddy. “Come on in,” I say, and he does, slowly. His eyes have that…

Not Quite Peru

Exiled from yourself, you fuse with everything you meet. You imitate whatever comes close. You become whatever touches you. –Luce Irigaray,This Sex Which Is Not One At night I sleep without movement in the suburbs of a Phoenix desert, having dreams of hot plants in the Andes, dreams filled with parents as they talk to…

Milk

How many nurses cared for her needs? The first dressed Bea’s wound, a puckered red mouth silenced with staples. A second nurse brought her a cup of chilled juice to wash away the sour taste in her mouth. A third nurse, a man, massaged her sore back. Then a fourth nurse came in, a small,…