The soles of our sneakers pounded years of sodden leaves. The rubber of Reeboks skidded on dew the sun never burned up deep in the shady woods. We heard them behind us laughing. The redhead the loudest, screeching and puffing.  Margaret, Wendy, and I knew where to go. The woods were filled with abandoned tree…

He was four. His babysitter was fourteen. She glowed and lifted him into a glowing happiness where it was warm and safe. When he turned five, she turned fifteen, and the difference was negligible; he was still in love, she was still beautiful. The house glowed in the afternoons when they watched television together waiting…

The wisest man I ever met was called Higgs. He lived at the edge of the village and the village was at the edge of the world. When I was young, during the holidays or at weekends, I would often go to his place. We would play cards or do a jigsaw puzzle if the…

You know by now I left you a trail. See, I’m not entirely without sentiment, as you might have thought.  First: A pair of men’s black glasses near the rocky ledge of a waterfall. They were my father’s, and I miss them, but he did love waterfalls. Always made us pump our little legs as…

Siobhan was thinking about her breasts. This was no good.  In the books she edited, women thought about them all the time. Or if not all the time—these women were also much concerned with dimensional portals, untrustworthy cyborgs—far more often than Siobhan did. They compared these breasts (busts, bosoms, mammaries, and once, alarmingly, fronts; she’d…

It happened the way things these days do: a text from my mother with a link to Facebook. The Washington County Sheriff’s Department posted a missing person’s notice. A face familiar at once, but from memories I would’ve thought atrophied completely by now…

“Did you know there is always a dead wasp hidden inside a fig?” Vera asks, sinking her teeth into the pink and green flesh. I’m sure it’s a myth but won’t say so. This summer we’re exploring sex with the enthusiasm a dedicated entomologist affords a newly discovered species. Sex is a red splash of…

Every day when we wake up in Hazel’s bed, our phones let out a collective beep in symphony. It is always the same message: Excessive Heat Warning. Degrees of up to 100 reported across the valley, cooling centers available around the city. Do not go outside. Do not stand in direct sunlight. If you do…

There are two boys in an attic, and one boy has a knife. It’s a little one, not much longer than either boy’s pinky. The boy with the knife has short black hair and thick glasses. He is pointing the knife at the short boy, his long blond hair and thin glasses.  It might not…

Summer, 1965. A white-hot, endless afternoon. Narrow alleyways flanked by ramshackle sheds; cicadas screech nonstop, near, far, everywhere. We stir awake from our naps, sweat imprinting our contours on bamboo sleeping mats. We fan ourselves with palm leaf fans, gulp water still cool from the clay jug as tall as our shoulders. Bored, we test…

There are people who can turn into houses, and my mother is one of them. Her story goes like this. She was seeing her sibling for the first time in five years. My mother, the house, sat on a little grassy perch by the beach, where spiral shells crawled ashore and the children built sandcastles,…

The ten short stories in Ranjan Adiga’s Diversity Quota deliver a full range of rich and complicated human emotion. Like some of his characters, Adiga is a Nepali immigrant to the United States, but these are not simply immigrants’ tales. These layered and nuanced stories range broadly. Adiga’s characters encounter unexpected setbacks, become enmeshed in…