As Nasim waited at the café for Marlin, he avoided thoughts of consequence. He’d come here straight from the cardiologist. Today she’d said the words “blood pressure” with new gravitas, her voice low and urgent. Now he reviewed the menu’s salads. House, Greek, Caesar, Cobb. On his phone he watched videos of cats and magicians …
“Tom fell from the sky,” Cecilia says when someone asks how they met. “At our age, when so much was settled, imagine that,” she adds. Both of them long divorced, their lives filled with visits and weekly phone calls with children and grandchildren, with daily, weekly, monthly routines. The refrigerators at both their houses papered …
Today, Cheryl is five: The number is startling, a near impossibility. Last night, roosting in her nest of unraveled mittens, in the stone alcove under the metro’s vaulted ceiling, Cheryl had considered her age with pride. Five! Most urban-dwelling pigeons didn’t live past the tender age of two. Both her parents had died when she …
Associate Editor Kate Jayroe: Dorf’s patient scrutiny surrounding cause and effect commingles so wonderfully with the iterative formal moves of this flash fiction. Dynamic and profound, “Conditional” cultivates a deep and singular feeling of care. Listen to Dorf read their micro: Conditional If after a bad night I need someone to blame, there are so many candidates. Streetlights. …
Amelia did not like to return to a dark house. She did not like the blank windows, or how the empty hall amplified her key fitting the lock, the turn and then fall of the tumbler, or how loudly the light thrummed in the fixture above after she found the switch. She did not like …
The woman who came to pick up the heroin was deaf. Later Glen realized he’d known that from the minute he saw her. There must have been some little clue, a certain darting of the eyes or clench-jawed expression, something he recognized from all the years with his brother, Donald. But there would never be …
Mrs. Ho always had a hard time getting to the Guang Ming Shan temple on her own. From Bedok, where she lived, there was a change of trains at City Hall, going from green line to red. Alighting from the train at Bishan and pushing through the crowd, she often had trouble finding her way …
The same spring my sister Kaylee was naked in Hustler, coyotes came down from the hills, knocking over garbage cans and killing people’s pets. One morning the Vasquezes next door found their cat under the hedges, and you should have heard Mrs. Vasquez howl. I went out to look, but all that was left was …
You have the tiniest little baby cataracts, the ophthalmologist tells me, and he laughs a little, because apparently cataracts, when small, are funny. I’m in the chair with the thing that looks like a 1970s TV robot hovering in front of my face, and I don’t think it’s funny because (1) all I can imagine …
Here on Route 25, there is a ravine between the road and the barbed-wire fence, a fence with tires filling in gaps at the bottom, a fence that is all local tradition and pragmatism. The dirt is a full red, and the weather is almost summer. Three cows have escaped and walk easily, gracefully even, …