Nandu turns five today. I’m given a list of things to get for the birthday party. Crayons, extra paper cups, Scotch tape, board pins, apples,…
When he was five years old, my grandfather discovered how to converse with the dead. It was a time for believing in Argentina. The Man…
Not too many memories here, in these chic walls caught in the daily grind. But between the walls there are those truths—whistling through the subway…
“You shouldn’t wear red. It’s not slimming. You need dark colors to minimize your weight. Are you listening to me?” Margie walked away from Vivian’s…
Kyle used to be pretty. He used to stop them in their tracks. He pretended he didn’t notice how mouths hung open and brains whirred…
What you seek is seeking you, Sara reads, a languid smile on her 26-year-old lips as she flips through a faded blue notebook and pauses,…
It rained all through May in Fruili Venezia Giulia. One Sunday they ran the marathon wearing raincoats and windcheaters. Sidrah put her one-person moka pot…
I turned seventy-five yesterday. Maxine, this alluring intuit from Mexico, told Sanjay last year, that I would wake up on the morning of my seventy-fifth…
I’m inking up a fish, concentrating on each scale. A faint breeze tickles the back of my neck. “Stop sneaking up on me, Emilio,” I…
Elijahu, a word please. She leaps from the birth bed faster than a woman who has spent the last 40 hours sweating, heaving, grunting, shifting…
New York City in the winter is a difficult place for a three-year-old. The sidewalks are small, packed with snow and tourists, and slippery with…
I.Buy the lotion. Buy the oil. Take the homeopathic vitamin mixtures. Drink the tinctures. Sweat lodge. Meditation. Cleanses. Wheatgrass so thick you choke. Teas so…
She arrived in Buenos Aires with the story born of her travels so fulsome in her that she felt like a woman she’d seen in…
1956 was an especially poor monsoon year, the drought which had gripped our region intermittently over the past few years was now starting to take…
I No one in Bodhi’s village had expected an ascent of the Mount Everest. It alarmed his mother. Men had trespassed on an abode of…
On an otherwise ordinary autumn day, I killed a three-year-old boy. One might think that the air held some hint of warning, but it didn’t—just…
The wind blows the dust and dry dirt across the plains, ceaselessly lifting it from the earth only to set it down again elsewhere. The…
“One of us should live here some day,” Dinesh says, gazing up at the ceiling in the living room of 42 RC. His sister, Sathya,…
“Yo, J, Got a light?” I pulled the convenient store lighter from my pocket with finger cutoff gloves. My nails were blackened from the shop,…
I grew up afraid of asking questions, afraid of being curious. It still affects the way I live. Any time I crossed that line as…