Fiction
How To Converse With The Dead
When he was five years old, my grandfather discovered how to converse with the dead. It was a time for believing in Argentina. The Man..
Section
Fiction
Showing 313-336 of 555 pieces
Fiction
Still the ‘A’ Train
Not too many memories here, in these chic walls caught in the daily grind. But between the walls there are those truths—whistling through the subway..
Fiction
The Mosque
“You shouldn’t wear red. It’s not slimming. You need dark colors to minimize your weight. Are you listening to me?” Margie walked away from Vivian’s..
Fiction
Pretty
Kyle used to be pretty. He used to stop them in their tracks. He pretended he didn’t notice how mouths hung open and brains whirred..
Fiction
57 Ways to Talk About Your Time
You did not want it. When it came you’d have to enter that veiled, silent place where the women lived, and the things you loved—the..
Fiction
The Mistaken Time Traveller (circa 2010)
I set the time coordinates for May, the year 2020, ten years from now,I made the jump but, much to my dismay, to a parallel..
Fiction
E-Love
What you seek is seeking you, Sara reads, a languid smile on her 26-year-old lips as she flips through a faded blue notebook and pauses,..
Fiction
Not a Lion
1 The fifteen-month-old climbs the winding staircase of their duplex to the small bedroom he shares with his two-year-old brother. The father is close behind,..
Fiction
The Fall
She remembers it differently. The man did not kill himself, he fell. She couldn’t know for sure but she had just talked to the man,..
Fiction
Mother
It rained all through May in Fruili Venezia Giulia. One Sunday they ran the marathon wearing raincoats and windcheaters. Sidrah put her one-person moka pot..
Fiction
Epiphany
I turned seventy-five yesterday. Maxine, this alluring intuit from Mexico, told Sanjay last year, that I would wake up on the morning of my seventy-fifth..
Fiction
Hiring a Hitman in Chinese
It was on a smoggy Shanghai morning when Wang hired a hitman to kill his wife. Wang’s wife Li Ying was rich, a fuerdai. Her..
Fiction
Tea for Two
The first time our neighbor, Ms. Plinkett, made me a cup of tea, all the illusions of adulthood and demure culture I was working so..
Fiction
Fish Prints
I’m inking up a fish, concentrating on each scale. A faint breeze tickles the back of my neck. “Stop sneaking up on me, Emilio,” I..
Fiction
A Feminine Rage
After Poe I. Shriveled up leaves hang from the topmost branches of skeletal trees. Black smudges against a ghostly winter sky—like sleeping bat babies, or..
Fiction
First cut
Elijahu, a word please. She leaps from the birth bed faster than a woman who has spent the last 40 hours sweating, heaving, grunting, shifting..
Fiction
The Best Stories
New York City in the winter is a difficult place for a three-year-old. The sidewalks are small, packed with snow and tourists, and slippery with..
Fiction
Novena
I.Buy the lotion. Buy the oil. Take the homeopathic vitamin mixtures. Drink the tinctures. Sweat lodge. Meditation. Cleanses. Wheatgrass so thick you choke. Teas so..
Fiction
Us Kids
In Winter the teachers stop patrolling the school grounds. They stand in huddles, hands wrapped around steaming mugs, finding relief in the alcove out of..
Fiction
Perennials
In the garden. It looks like snow, a surreal May frost, but the sun slaps my winter-paled skin as I hunch over the tiny growths..
Fiction
The Girl on the Roof
She arrived in Buenos Aires with the story born of her travels so fulsome in her that she felt like a woman she’d seen in..
Fiction
One Year, One Hundred Years
Imagine entering an apartment building that is outwardly non-descript, concrete, post-modern; it rises shadowing a mosque next door. Imagine the muezzin’s call to prayer is..
Fiction
The Reincarnated One
1956 was an especially poor monsoon year, the drought which had gripped our region intermittently over the past few years was now starting to take..
Fiction
Lost and found
The old book’s cloth cover had turned gray. A friend, who knows my passion for Eastern poetry, had just given it to me as a..