Fiction |
“Teeth,” “The Man and the Woman” & “The Carpenter”
“Since the floor was a darkly stained oak polished to a sheen, the ceiling could see his own reflection if he looked intently, as one lover might look into another’s eyes and see himself captured there.”
Fiction |
“Incandescent Obsolescence”
“But our life expectancies hover around 203. More than enough time for an average of four twenty-year marriages with a full gender array of spouses — organic and AI — with the final decades of our lives whiled away on the well-appointed Archipelago of the Old, wrinkle-free and comfortably numb …”
Fiction |
“The Reading Lamp”
“At the end of the hallway, I could hear sounds of excited voices speaking in loud tones behind a blue painted door. This was the voice, if I was to believe my assignment, of the person who was said to be the greatest reader of literature in the world.”
Fiction |
“Eid Mubarak”
“Her dad said it like a punchline: ‘In December, there’s a card, white inside, and handwritten: Eid Mubarak. I nearly fell over.’ Few of their neighbors knew that Eid was the Muslim gift-giving holiday. Back then, even fewer cared.”
Fiction |
“A Collision”
“A tall short-haired blond woman got out of the Honda who looked familiar, vaguely, and then both were standing in the cold in the alley, and first one said, Are you okay? and then the other said it and Caroline said, My puppy dog’s a bit rattled, and the other was so sorry.”
Fiction |
“Woman, Blue”
“The voices had crushed him once, with their weight and numbers, with the fears and anxieties and regrets and the losses they spoke of. He wouldn’t let that happen again. He wouldn’t go back to the hospital.”
Fiction |
“After School Special”
“Because of its location in the back of a mostly evacuated mini-shopping strip, The Falls was always close to empty — the perfect rendezvous point for students joined in something, Liza put it as ‘beyond mere cliquishness.'”
Fiction |
“Walking on Our Knees Backwards Home”
“… let me assure you the pain eventually will subside, but the memories will continue to haunt. Even after 65 years, my imagination wades to the bank of the Tallahatchie River where my son died.”
Fiction |
“Infection Control”
“The citrus scent hit her nostrils, the smell of long ago summer days while polishing the big cherry dining table to the sound of Little Beth and her friends chattering outside while they played four square on the driveway.”
Fiction |
“A Terrible Gift”
“I’d always had trouble dedicating myself to one mode for long. I oscillated between the abstract, the realist, the symbolic. Beyond the embarrassment, it was a source of fear that I’d never be more than a tinkerer, a dilettante.”
Fiction |
“Fengshui”
“When Ying died of an unknown disease at age 36, her only son, a thin and short 12-year old boy, could neither afford to hire anyone to move her body to the family graveyard, nor do the job by himself.”
Fiction |
“Family Portrait with Trees”
“From the window, a girl looks back at herself. She is six. There is a storm in her bedroom: thunder, his breathing near her ear.”
Fiction |
“I Saw Elvis in Palm Springs”
“Claudia was in Palm Springs because she’d made a fairly lucrative commercial deal with a Japanese yogurt company and wanted to go somewhere alone where she could pretend she’d come by the money in a more respectable way. Like phishing or selling drugs.”
Fiction |
“The Peshaman Fragments”
“When at rest, the mouth often does not relax but returns to a puckered, circular kissing shape that suggests it is at once both open and closed, an orifice of both inbound and outbound potential.”
Fiction |
“Facts About Bald Men,” “Up On the Roof,” “The Bald Man and His Twin,” “Return of the Kleptomaniac” & “Prayer for Hair”
“I stole the last hair from a bald man. The blackish-gray hair was surprisingly long, maybe three feet in length, and had wrapped around his head several times and dangled down his back.”