Fiction

It’s nothing more than a quick glimmer on the asphalt, weak morning sun grazing dull metal. A minor miracle in the parking lot at Saint Ursula as an old man’s filmy gaze catches a wink of light. He stops, and for one more step, the woman next to him keeps walking. He sets a hand …

1 I had just closed the window curtains when Keith arrived. The end of the workweek brought a relentless spell of exhaustion and with it the unwillingness to cook. I had a container in the microwave of leftovers from the night before.  He followed me to the kitchen, and I felt his eyes as I …

When Kyle turns off the vacuum cleaner, silence rushes down the second floor hallway of her home and closes around her like an angry mob. She stands there in a pair of Mom-cutoff denim shorts, loose blue tank-top, and crocs, with her black hair spilling free from the back and edges of a blue bandanna. …

“Xetery!” Joyce shrieked, hurling Great Grub magazine the length of her spacious kitchen. The cover shot of her own airbrushed face sailed over the breakfast bar and her husband Roger then hit the wall and crumpled onto the spotless floor. Roger looked up from his croissant. “What the…?” “Xetery!” Joyce barked and stormed out. “Xetery?” …

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 …