I was born at 6:04 p.m. on the 3rd day of the Moon’s skulking journey across the skylands. She is a child of Krithika, the temple priest tells my mother, ...
As I’d begun to do lately, get out paper, my stack of comics from under the bed. I start drawing.
Jittery, a twiddling, nerve-pulling runway, touch-down, to pencil scratching, scratching, then, ...
Papa’s blood runs hot, a carryover from the Sicilian sun, Mama says. Temperatures rise, and storms brew, feeding off the latent heat. The fury of God in man. Our lot ...
I was sitting in the rail station waiting for the 10:30 to London when a mother with two small children sat beside me, her daughter wedged between us. The girl ...
He licks her big toe, glides his tongue across the arch of her foot, softens the cracked and toughened skin of her heel with warm saliva, and then presses his ...
The way the two women walk six feet apart, one on the sidewalk and the other in the empty street = the way the body and the soul walk together ...
All that winter we read Hannah Arendt, we read Men in Dark Times.
There’s this bizarro technique my doctor’s urging. It’s got a bunch of scientific terms that just sound to me like whatever whatever and no fucking way this is going to ...
Inevitably, implacably, the rain fell, its blanket mass a monsoon vehicle that swept across Ypres. It had been ceaseless for months, so much so, that you could not imagine a ...
After eight weeks at home, my daughter alternated between lethargy and irritability. Between sleeping and meltdowns, explosions of preadolescent rage that leveled the living room, kitchen, and shared bedroom of ...
It’s the kind of intimacy usually shared by people who are fucking. Not mother and daughter. That thought made her smile when she decided to make this garden their place: ...
My brother and I are surgeons. We spend our days in the woods by our home, slicing the limbs from eighty-year-old relics, listening to the sounds of splitting wood and ...
The pearls had already seen much catastrophe. They were happy in the Jesus Loves Me pawn shop, reclining on navy velvet. Serene. No pressure to perform. Their previous owner navigated ...
It starts with a girl— like you and me she walked these streets once. Right here, among fallen leaves and twisted roots, she found him. She held the owl orphan ...
The Bat was the guest of honor at The New Yorker literary festival that year.
The sky. The grass. Blue. Green. Cloud country. Expansive. Overwhelming. So blue. So green. Screams. Mom. Toddler. Arm. Extends. Mouth. Open. Bees. Fill.
The police were always at our building, shaking down suspects, and belting out questions. Where did you get the drugs? Why did you ...
Somewhere in the dark, I heard them hit. I heard it one, two, three, and the boy crying for them to stop, then just crying, then nothing at all. If ...
‘Yates types the names of the websites from the Visa bill and his browser is flooded with flesh. So many scenarios, inside, outside, by the pool, in a massage parlour, ...
‘He is lying on a tongue of a leviathan—sinking into the stomach lining of a whale. Swallowed whole. ‘ In the belly of a whale a man contemplates his own ...
