One morning, I’m sucking down coffees in my kindergarten classroom when two men in suits stroll in.  “Nice room you got here,” one says. He looks like Steve Buscemi and has a similar kind of menace, a kind not backed up by physical size. The other one, no bigger, picks up a kid’s art project…

His name was Dozer, but I liked to call him Baby.  Baby, sit. Baby, shake. Baby, roll over. He never listened because he only knew his real name, since Daddy and Peter called him so, but I knew he liked Baby, too, because he’d look at me with his big brown eyes when I said…

Years of going to México with your dad, and y’all still haven’t found her. He packs up the truck without speaking, but shortly after you climb in, he calls you to his side.  “Salte de la troca, you need to get ready.” You’re little but old enough for your words to matter when crossing, old…

… that’s how Amy and Renaldo tricked the two of us, telling each of us that we were just going to the shooting range and never mentioning another person. They placed us together in a tree stand separate from them. We talked about how we loved shattering a clay pigeon mid-arc, but we couldn’t imagine…

She cuts the lights in the basement and strikes a match. Shadows on her hands and thorn scratches across her knuckles. She touches the flame to the wick of a vesper candle. A cigarette between her lips. She counts her husband’s steps on the floor above her. When it’s quiet, she imagines him at the…

What was left of our childhood could have fit in the jar of coffee we snatched from the tallest shelf in the kitchen so that we wouldn’t fall asleep. The kind of coffee Ali’s parents drank was torrefacto, which sounded like instant to us, so when Ali lined up our five glasses of milk on…

Before his death, my grandfather would repeat the story of the first time his grandfather, or my great-great-grandfather, met a white man. It was a story from the time when my family was still living in Manchuria before coming back to Korea. My great-great-grandfather’s name was Ugyeong. Ugyeong was the eldest son of Jinseong, and…

Sarah folds the dead student’s poems and carries them back to the creek the student had often written about. She holds them in her hands and then burns them and drops the flaming last corner into the water. Sometimes there really is nothing left. The few ashes extinguish when they hit the water. What once…

Talia grabbed my hand, tugging me toward her backyard. Her slap bracelet rubbed against my wrist like a secret code. Sarah skipped alongside, as excited as her sister, singing a song she was clearly making up. Something about the sun, surprises, and me. I was among the few on the block who could tell the…

He woke up to find he was eighty-five, but that was impossible, because he was only seven, and he had just turned fifteen, and he was thirty-one, but also fifty-two. His parents were young, and his parents were middle-aged, and his parents were aging. He was at their funeral. That was so long ago. Sometimes…

We didn’t hear the detective knock. Freddy was reading in his room. I was almost done working on a new painting in my studio, a figurative experiment, though it was getting too dark to see anything clearly. When no one answered the door, the detective walked along the side of the house and tapped on…

The first women returning to the shore found the handbag. Along the river, in a grassy hollow on the bank where they met each month, the purse went unnoticed by the women until they were just upon the spot where it huddled curiously among their towels and clothes.  The women had been out quite far…