My wife screams and my daughter’s hair-mottled scalp crowns. The doctor guides my hands and I grasp my daughter, her small body taught and alive,…
Ma at the bookshelves, searching for new knowledge. She takes a novel between her calloused fingertips, rummages through the pages like she’s looking for something…
ATTENTION PASSENGERS: Sorry to startle and disappoint, to inconvenience and annoy, but our priority one is not arrival or commute, it’s code for deliverance of…
Everyone say black is the colour of death. But Emily know it ain’t true. Black is the colour of Mama bein’ alive. It the colour…
I wake up from my nap. The house is empty. You said you were going to the store, but that was many hours ago. In…
The tears came early that night, something she had expected. She had felt it building all day, a jagged boulder against her chest, sliding deeper…
When I first see it, I shudder. The knuckles are wrinkled and gnarly. The skin is gray. The middle finger tilts too far to the…
I remember the last time I saw my father. He left for war and died a short time later, a Marine helicopter pilot, flying in…
A lock of strawberry blonde hair peeking out from under a fuzzy winter hat freezes me in the grocery store parking lot. The hat is…
Inspired by an Oneida Tribal Tale and a Selection from the Longer Story, “Cloven” On a stormy summer night just like this one, just around…
Sidestep the puddle that stretches from one side of the sandy road to the other, up to the lip of the cement doorstep. Knock on…
You did not want it. When it came you’d have to enter that veiled, silent place where the women lived, and the things you loved—the…
I set the time coordinates for May, the year 2020, ten years from now,I made the jump but, much to my dismay, to a parallel…
1 The fifteen-month-old climbs the winding staircase of their duplex to the small bedroom he shares with his two-year-old brother. The father is close behind,…
She remembers it differently. The man did not kill himself, he fell. She couldn’t know for sure but she had just talked to the man,…
It was on a smoggy Shanghai morning when Wang hired a hitman to kill his wife. Wang’s wife Li Ying was rich, a fuerdai. Her…
The first time our neighbor, Ms. Plinkett, made me a cup of tea, all the illusions of adulthood and demure culture I was working so…
After Poe I. Shriveled up leaves hang from the topmost branches of skeletal trees. Black smudges against a ghostly winter sky—like sleeping bat babies, or…
In Winter the teachers stop patrolling the school grounds. They stand in huddles, hands wrapped around steaming mugs, finding relief in the alcove out of…
In the garden. It looks like snow, a surreal May frost, but the sun slaps my winter-paled skin as I hunch over the tiny growths…