A boy is born, nose running before he knows why, but he knows this place doesn’t feel like home, doesn’t feel like warmth, doesn’t feel like womb, and the room is bright, bright like a future might be if you run long enough, but how long is long enough and does speed affect time or…

The doctor gives me conflicting information about my heart. After this, I feel a shift in my own personal gravity. Each step is something weightier than before. On my morning walk, it is over ninety degrees. My own shadow scares me and I feel my heart rate increase, my chest tighten. If I were my…

Water pushed across the floor of the basement, gray paint loosening in large mushroom blooms, chips bubbling and floating away. The sump pump bobbed above the drainage pit as the pipe above it dripped steadily down the side wall, evolving into a flow that raced across one thousand square feet and lapped the stairs. The…

We catch the bus to Waikiki on a Saturday, leaving our dormitories on the mountain behind. We want to tan and check out the hot tourists. The bus is cheap, only fifty cents. Our bags are packed full of coconut oil from Tahiti, blanket-sized beach towels, and sandwiches from the dining hall. There’s no AC…

I had come to dinner at my father’s — our monthly ritual — but after the smoked brisket he left. I did the dishes, then looked for him out back and found him dragging a piano into the backyard. He had it on two wooden planks that he rotated, moving one ahead and then sliding…

You were sitting at the kitchen table when he told you he was moving to Hollywood to follow his dream of becoming an actor. He ate beignets you made from scratch. Smacking his lips as remnants of the powdered sugar dotted his chin. You smiled, even though you felt like you’d been gut-punched. You wondered…

Years later, moments after she narrowly escapes the fate of Joyce’s Eveline and is safely inside the train pulling out of the dreadful, damp town, and the eyes of the dark young person at the elbow all aglow with the vision of far sunlit lands, this day comes to her like some forgotten smell. She…

Daylight spills over the horizon and floods the paths of the famous cemetery. From the rooftop patio of an adjacent gastropub, the superintendent of the dead appraises his domain. He wonders what it might be like to live in a city that boasts, for example, a famous zoo. As the sun ascends, the shadows of…

Translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey The first time I made a wish, I wished for a tin frog that made a loud clicking sound when you squeezed it, which I’d seen lying around at a friend’s house. The next time I played there, I took the frog home with me. This is how my first…

Are the other mothers working harder than she is, she wonders, so very much harder? Ought she to be ashamed? Or are they working markedly less hard — watching movies in the middle of the day, taking time to smell the roses as it were? Are not their families better off under the light hands…

Before a place can become a place, it must have secrets. A boy goes to a field where five sheep have died. In search of something conclusive, a way to proceed. There is no trace of carnage: wolf, coyote. The ground is frozen, snowless. The boy kicks at the soil with the worn toe of…

Badal had choreographed many fierce duels in his time. Take for instance the battle between his chestnut-brown pheasant and a gray rooster of foreign breed that his opponent bought at a high price. The gray bird jostled nobly but in the end Badal’s pheasant spattered its entrails. During the few minutes Badal’s birds took to…