My mom used to pinch me so hard that her fingers would snap. Pinch. Like twigs cracking under feet. Pinch. Fireflies of pain. + I sat next to her at the salon, her hair all wrapped up in tinfoil as she smoked. I’m getting old, she said, her glare on her reflection in the mirror.…

Rita Whitman had long ago reached the point of no return in her feelings about her younger siblings, resenting their noise and needs and clutter, unable to see them anymore as individual children. Despite this, her next-to-youngest brother Lenny began to seek out her attention. Lenny would come home from elementary school just before her…

Back when the White Terror was ripping through Taipei and Tainan and dozens of other rising cities and villages that I had never set foot in, all the kids were scared that they would come home one afternoon and throw down their bookbags and baseball bats, and their fathers and grandfathers and big brothers who…

The one thing marriage gives you is someone to blame. James was always late for work but, a week after his nuptials, he blamed his tardiness on his wife. The wife took extra long getting ready this morning. You know how that goes. Women, right? And I knew Des always wanted a way out of…

The day after the babysitter left was the same day Janie found the prosthetic leg. She was walking in a field where corn had once been planted but since, Father had come along and combined it down. As a result, there were little bits of stalk poking out and making the ground uneven. Some, stubbornly…

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Constantin Reliu learned in January that he was dead. After more than 20 years of working as a cook in Turkey, the 63-year-old returned home to Romania to discover that his wife had had him officially registered as dead. He has since been living a legalistic nightmare of trying to prove…

At the hat store, the clerks knew her name and reputation. She was Selena, the girl who liked hats. But she was also the girl whose father had named her for a lunar eclipse. She’d been coming by for years. The shop was beneath the apartment where she had been born, but Selena never asked…

You want him to say all of the obvious things, how here among the stars, the Earth shrinking like a lost balloon beneath him, it’s hard to believe what we all take so seriously: Instagram and the NFL playoffs, the neighbor’s overgrown hornbeam, text messages in the dark. You want him to tell you the…

He wants his wife’s portrait painted. He knows nothing of art, doesn’t even have an interest, but a slew of recent police brutality lawsuits against the city, his firm’s biggest client, has accrued him the sort of money that’s got him thinking about lineage. He considers the foyer of the Garden District home he’s always…

For days I’ve been looking for the list. It’s somewhere in the house with the rocker, the lamp with the pink shade, the round mirror, the square mirror, the oval mirror, the postman’s desk, the photograph of doors — things I don’t remember acquiring. I look beneath pillows, scarves, woven baskets. I look in pockets…

At our weekly Wednesday dinner, Ruby and I burnt the fish and began her pursuit of moving on. I helped Ruby choose her best photos and rearrange the sentences of her biography into a more appealing order. Draw people in with the dancing, I said. Don’t mention the wax museum in your living room until…

I get home and check my answering machine. My daughter always says, Dad, why do you have that thing? You’re the last one in kingdom come. On it, there’s the sound of trumpets. It sounds like 10,000 of them, blaring away, and they play the sweetest melody. It might be one hundred horns or seven.…