Fiction

Last summer everyone I knew was trying to give me advice, but something made me certain that anything worth listening to was going to come from Carl. Carl was my boss at the Maple Grotto, a retirement community with on-site hospice care. Every morning he would gather the grounds crew and maintenance guys in his …

If her head gets cold, it starts to hurt, so on days when the sun cannot dry her hair on the short walk from the sea to Grandma’s house, Alfhild’s father massages her scalp until her thin, little body stops shivering under the towel. It has become a routine, a ritual almost; Alfhild finishing her …

Peng Soon had knocked the glass of vodka and lime out of Paul’s hand at Taboo the first time they met. He had swung out his arm to illustrate a point in the story he was telling—a recent sexual conquest on a business trip to Taipei—and his hand met Paul’s glass. Unruffled, Peng Soon ran …

It’s winter in the sturgeon-spearing capital of the world. Once again, there is justification for the expensive trucks parked in the driveways of crumbling lakeside houses, waiting to be turned over and driven out onto the ice. Standing on the lake, which you can barely see across, is like being on a planet people are …

Just enough Luis knows I’m not in love with him, although he’s never asked. I can tell by the way he fits himself around the space where the question would go, always aware of the outline of it, the sharp edges that would catch and cut him if he got too close. Some days I …

Russo mimicked the pimp walk he had always seen in American movies as he went around the table and gave his four siblings an extra spoonful of oatmeal. “What time is Mama calling?” Jean, the youngest, asked, his eyes still crusted in the corners. He always asked the same question. It was like the questions …

On Christmas we wake up Puerto Rican. That’s when our grandmother stops pretending that hers is our only blood and lets our grandfather’s bleed back in. She stands at the feet of our beds and pulls on our blanketed toes. “Wake up, you two,” she says, holding up an album cover. “Merry Christmas.” All year …

I was feeling nostalgic the other day while talking to my wife about the malls of New Jersey. I was surprised she didn’t remember the Woodbridge Mall, the one with the tigers. She’d grown up in Wilmington, Delaware, but that wasn’t so far away. “The TV show?” I said as a memory jog. Nothing. So …

8 September 1330, Nativity of Mary The collective berserk occasioned by the visit of the chanting Benedictines at the Assumption has ebbed at long last, and no one is now shrieking in the cloisters. Much has happened since I last wrote. Sister Heloise has been stripped, shamed, and dispatched by ox to her home in …