Fiction

Today the blinds are open, no matter how hot it is outside. Mom and I look down all twelve floors. My brother’s red car, the size of a pack of cigarettes, parallel parks between a motorcycle and a pickup truck. When he gets out of the car, he’s the size of a matchstick. Some girl …

Associate Editor James Ellenberger: “Boom” reads like a vivisection of a Studio Ghibli film. It’s magical, beautifully rendered, and haunting. What strikes me the most is the piece’s aural effect: McMahon layers vowels (“Now it looms, quiet, as water should be”) in a manner that’s reminiscent of waves overlapping and erasing themselves. The alliterative movements, of …

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 …

It’s the first night I’ve slept over at Gerald’s. Yes, I am dating someone named Gerald. I asked if I could come up with a cooler name for him, something modern, geometric, all sharp angles and dangerous overtones—Axel, Gunner, Blaze—but he declined. Gerald’s cute in an awkward way, wears rectangular glasses and ties patterned with …

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 …

At dinner that night, Lo chops off her boyfriend’s head. He’s explaining again, holding forth about how she just has a better eye for cleaning than he does, it’s a compliment to her that she even notices when something’s out of place, he wishes he could be as detail oriented as her—and she slinks into …

1 Get a job at the local bowling alley when your mom starts drinking again. Take whatever position they are willing to give you. You will be fifteen years old with no experience, three-fifths of a mustache, and the charisma of a dried pickle, so your only offer’ll be to man concessions for what you …

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 …

1. Plan ahead. Remember, your bathroom will be out of commission for a few days. Grip the handle of a screwdriver, and wedge its blade beneath the tiles, stab and jam, push down until you hear that pop, until the tile breaks in half and makes an edge sharp enough to cut. You will not …