Fiction |
from Days
“… all the ways in which nature is animal, nature is human, and then swallows the human, absorbs it like its own blood, poor or rich, all of us roaming in our clothes like divots, like bumps with mirrors coming out of them …”
Fiction |
“Running Free”
“Then I felt that distinct dampness in my underwear and wiped scarlet. On my way home, through tears, I saw Open blink at the pet store.”
Fiction |
“The End of the Line”
“I claimed the first empty seat I found, happy to leave our conversation on the platform, but when he wedged next to me, it seemed certain to continue.”
Fiction |
from No. 54
“I call up Madame D. I’ve had another offer, I say. How much? she asks. Twelve and a half thousand a month, I reply. Then you’ll get the same from us, she says, and whispers, Now I own you.”
Fiction |
“The Unnaming” and “War Story”
“A vortex of air had trapped the bird within the flag — the same flag our mother received after our father died in that faraway country.”
Essay |
“July, August” and “Maybe Tomorrow or the Day After”
“I’ve found many good books. A book on how to garden, circa 1970. A book on country drives to take and why you might. A book of the history of a little town nearby, the one with so many stone walls.”
Fiction |
“Response”
“I’d come up with a title for the Beckett essay, which is odd because I hadn’t written a word and I usually don’t title things until after I’ve completed them. ‘Nearer My Molloy Than Thee.’ I worried about the reception of that title.”
Fiction |
“Kill Price,” “Lemons” and “Baby Cuz”
“He asks for lemons by saying lemons but his wife says can we have some lemons please. He ignores this, at her trying to tell him what to say in English or how to say it as if he didn’t know how to ask for what he wanted.”
Fiction |
“Snug Harbor,” “They roam the bay unloved,” and “A comet blazed across the sky”
“… and when I turn the map over I see that it tells you nothing about coming ashore, and everything about where to drown.”
Fiction |
“Collaboration Incidents” and “Liz Phair, unexiled”
“Once, Beatriz had loved. Now she was transcended by the Paradise she privileged into an action that humans could not name. It made her whitehot, and everybody saw it.”
Fiction |
“The Seventh Degree of Freedom”
“He said goodnight and went back aft to join my mother in the cockpit. I nestled into the fabric, facing skyward, glad to be out of the stifling cabin.”
Fiction |
“Should we talk about it?”
“A woman I used to live with lives inside the internet. We still live in the same city. I go around the streets looking for her, but each time I catch a glimpse, she slips around the pixelated corners. A black scarf, a yellow shoe, a thread of yellowed silver hair mucking up the perfect blue pool of frozen sidewalk gunk.”
Fiction |
from Vienna
“I was forty-one years old, wore a hijab, and looked stylish in it. I spoke French, but I didn’t apply for a visa to a country that spoke the language I’d learned, because I found something vastly more entertaining here.”
Fiction |
“More Harm Than Good” and “Late August Edition”
“My roommate’s dissertation included a multimodal component where I was asked to pee on an upholstered wing chair. Even after a quart of Hawaiian Punch I was unable to perform.”
Fiction |
“to team” and “to meme”
“Gander argues that the meme wasn’t about the company. ‘It’s just like … a funny picture.'”