On top of the water, the sky rippled thinly. Lake Macatawa was clear and cold that fall. My paddle cut through the surface, carving circles that spread outward, overlapping as they went. Eddies …
He leaves a note for her on the kitchen table. She's just spent the week in San Francisco with her mother, and the moment she walks in with her luggage, sweating, she sees the note pinned down by her …
My father beat me with a lot of different things, but the thing I remember best was the hairdryer. My father loved that hair dryer. He used it every day. He had beautiful, flowing hair, much longer …
Margaret and Kennar kicked back a lot with the other thirteen couples after their day's work was done: his, out on the massive Ghawar oil field; hers, folding laundry and wringing diapers and …
Begin at end, at the beginning of a real winter, in the barn, up in the hayloft, alone. In Woods, Kansas, standing in the hayloft door, looking out across the bare December fields. Wrapped in a …
GUILLERMO COTTO-THORNER was born in Puerto Rico in 1916 and migrated to New York City in 1938. In addition to publishing two novels, Manhattan Tropics (1951) and Gambeta (1971), Cotto-Thorner was a …
The first time Juan Ruiz proposed to me, I was eleven years old, skinny and flat chested. I was half asleep, my frizzy hair had burst out from the rubber-band holding it together and my dress was on …
The birthing-dying galaxies shined through them so that their inner lives—their most intimate memories and dreams—were as visible as the organs of a gecko in the glow of a porch light.
“Have fun!” they said, and the girls stood on the porch in sandals and cut-off shorts and tank tops, smelling of shea butter and bug spray. Their mothers’ cars clouded the driveway with gravel …
Sinuous, frenetic, hard, malleable, still, Britney dances. A parody of a caricature, a heroine, a victim, a killer, the whole Spears shtick. Dante was still exclaiming, “A demon! A real …
At twelve years old we had already burned our way through the rest of our father’s porn collection, a small filing cabinet packed with VHS tapes from the early 1980s, when he and our mothers were …
She is tired, this panicked dreamer at the edge of the wood. The white hairs in the cups of her ears have caught the yellow of bulldozers, yield signs, the puddles of piss men dressed in orange leave …
Your best friend Tina has three Taylor Swifts swimming in her pool. She has a miniature Taylor Swift she keeps on a perch, a Taylor Swift with wings. You’re so jealous. She’s not even paying …
As she drives Georgette home, she can’t resist saying, when they’re almost there, Such pointy cheekbones, aren’t you afraid they’ll cut your husband? Georgette laughs coldly. I wish they’d …
Today, however, all I could think of was the nose of Gogol. The image of a human-sized nose banging on my door.
She said that because his mother had given birth to him in a tub filled with day-old water and bless-ed salt, Atar‘atheh must have been responsible for his conception in the first place.
Your husband watches like a phantom through the window, his face silvered in smoke. His eyes, once brimming with affection, have slanted into whispers. You want his puckered face to catch a clod of …
Papa blew way over the limit on the field test, but he swore it was a set-up. He kept a loaded assault rifle next to the front door, and a handgun under the seat of his truck.
Our sons told us to place the steel cleavers we used to butcher hogs and chickens beneath our pillows, in case our enemies appeared.
Mom is pregnant. In nine months, our family will never be the same. Our father won't make it. A baby will. Today we will go skiing. My mother calls for directions.