Fiction

My friend is picking meat from a bone when she says her marriage has become bland. Calling it a bone doesn’t paint a clear picture. Could be the leg of a deer? A horse? I ask if she wants the number for my therapist. My feelings are what they are, she says. They’re not going …

Carrie didn’t have any kind of visa to stay in the country. Her tourist visa had run out six months prior and she’d ended up working for cash at her friend Marianne’s holistic bookstore. That was where she met Bruce. Twice a week he came in to do healing sessions in the back room and …

Winner of the 2024 Tobias Wolff Award (Fiction) I always felt that the Aquarium was the eye of the city. From the top, it looked like a deep well that cast a shimmering dark blue shadow on people’s faces, making them seem transparent. The circular corridors of the gallery enclosed it like the Colosseum. Wearing …

In 1958, Angelo Rizzuto took a photograph of a mother and child waiting in New York’s Penn Station, a glass-domed extravaganza. The child looks like a doll sitting a few inches away from the mother, who wears white gloves and appears absorbed in thought. Likewise, the child is looking in a different direction. What liberates …

When I opened the door, Pam winced. She saw my red-veined eyes and assumed the tears were for her. “I’m so sorry to be putting you through this,” she said, pulling me into a hug. I was too embarrassed to correct her. I did grieve for Pam—I’m not a monster—but I hadn’t been crying about …

Everyone said that she should be grateful he’d married her, and the landowner knew it to be true. After all, not only had her family been poverty-ridden for generations, they also had a reputation for being addle-brained. If it had been up to him, wealthy zamindar that he was, he’d never have deigned to even …

The world ends on a Wednesday. You’re nearly through your status report. One more sentence explaining the Gantt chart you spent two hours massaging into place, and then your mid-week review would’ve been done. That chart was like a seed you’d nestled tenderly in the earth, positioned just so beneath a beam of sunlight, and …

Every M your dad writes comes out like the McDonald’s arches. No backbone on the left—just two camel humps. So every time he writes your name, you think of McDonald’s, and how you order the same thing every time you go there: a cheeseburger with just the meat, the cheese, and the bun. Plus a …

“We’re out the door, Jean,” Kyle said, setting two mugs in the sink and turning away. “Alright,” I said, tugging on the finger of my rubber glove. I could tell he’d been crying though God knows why. I was the one left here with a demented old man. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said, letting the …

You knock; I open the door to let you in. You apologize, tell me it has started to rain, try to explain your lateness, but I tell you I don’t mind. I offer you a can of beer, and you say thanks, and then you hesitate, look at me, and I think about looking away, …