Theo II’s ghost haunts me most nights, ever since I found him hanging in the stables, an ending that no doubt hastened the death of my grandfather—Sir Theo—a week later. ...
In this short piece, Brazilian novelist and short-story writer, Carol Bensimon, posits the life of a pool man after the virus has wrecked the tourism industry and the rich have ...
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 ...
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. Continue Reading LIGHTING THE MATCH
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 ...
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 ...
You squint at me as though you are only properly seeing me now for the first time. I scour your room which is the palest of blues. Continue ...
The wind blows cold and lonely off the prairie at night, hurtling along at ground level, then rising up, washing over the house. Continue Reading Seafaring in Minnesota
He was beautiful if you knew him, and could be a real bastard when he wanted to, and a lot of times when he didn’t. Continue Reading ...
She takes to visiting the shed on a daily basis, constantly checking over her shoulder on the lookout for Lottie or James, hoping to snatch a couple of hours to ...
We come into this as helpless faucets of overflowing salt ducts, eager and scampering, exhausting profusely to make sense yet never availing, barely scratching. Continue Reading Irene, ...
My father has always said we’re not Americans. Americans have presidents. We don’t. We were carted over here from a land far away and don’t know the way back, but ...
This morning when Walter tumbled off a beribboned donkey halfway up the steep cobblestone path from the port to Fira he was embarrassed. Continue Reading The Saffron Lover
But it wasn’t really a laugh. It was more like an ambulance siren than a laugh, all shrill and constant and loud, going “Ha ha ha” in a computer’s perfect ...
