Fiction

We’re driving the largest cleanup in history. . . . We let the plastic come to us, using the ocean currents in our advantage.—Boyan Slat Dear Boyan Slat, Honestly, I thought it was beautiful how after the rain drenched everything, the creeks rummaged through the holler, coaxing out all the plastic milk jugs and Clorox …

It was a warm midsummer night and getting dark now as Emily and a group of close friends sat on the grass of the courtyard, drinking beer and talking about orgasms—how it wasn’t always easy for women to have them. They had gathered to say goodbye to Emily, who had spent the last year in …

Ivanych stumbled out onto the porch, squinting against the cruel brightness of snow. Not a curl of smoke rose over the village—everyone wintered in the city now, or finally rested in their graves. Too bad he’d already filled the night bucket with yellow ice. It used to be the bucket never needed emptying, but lately …

“Now you need not die again, but still I wish you were here” – Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider My nephew is writing a book, he says, about Martin Luther King, Jr. “Now why would you do that?” I asked him. “Pick a topic without so much competition. Who’s going to read your …

She’s a healthy mussel. . . . She’s a wicked mussel. She’s a sliver of the liver of a river whose liver is sick. An ugly river, voluble with its complaints. I had this story from precisely such a river. Well, and so the credence you accord to trickling notes diluted and caught up in …

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 …

“The peephole is installed backward,” my one-night stand said as I sat up in bed. We were in his high-rise studio apartment. “I keep meaning to tape a piece of paper over it.” I thought about what this meant. A tiny aperture gave passersby in the hallway a fish-eye view into the bedroom. It wasn’t …

You think summers in New York are humid now, but this is nothing compared to 1983. That year the air was full of heavy metals. Headless bodies in topless bars, the first AIDS vigil, candle flames seizing in a night that felt like wet fleece. When de Kooning’s Seated Woman got up and walked away …

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 …

Finally, fifteen months after he died, I get my son’s death certificate in the mail. There it is: the manner of his death, the time, date, place, and also his name. It’s misspelled, both first and last. His middle name they got right. “I like the name, you like the name. But you just know …