“In the course of conducting interviews on the urban history of Jeddah, a port city in the Hijaz region of present-day Saudi Arabia, I came across the story of al-Qays …” — “Playing with Gender: The Carnival of al-Qays in Jeddah” by Ulrike Freitag + The tradition may have started this way, or it may…

Alex flew out here to stay with me a week. He recently got his own place, which does nothing to make me less obsolete in his life. Still, we had a plan and stuck to it, even though it was not a first choice for either of us. He’d grown his hair out since Christmastime.…

1. The dishes had belonged to his grandparents and were given to him as a gift. Plates, saucers, tea cups and bowls, all painted by hand and trimmed in metal, which made them valuable and beautiful, but also completely worthless pieces of shit, because they could not be placed in the microwave or washed in…

There is a village five miles from the monastery of King Edmund; near this place are some pits for wolves. During harvest, two children, a boy and a girl, completely green in their persons, emerged from these excavations. They were conducted to the village nearly exhausted with hunger, and yet could relish no species of…

Kiss: lightning striking the same tree twice, almost accidental. The sky: grey as the gravel of your dad’s driveway. Me: desperate as ripping a parachute open, thinking about you, thinking about you thinking about me, thinking about the curve of your spine, about the sesame seed splatter of freckles on your nose, about the dinosaur…

Ed had too many problems to go on living the way he was, so he moved again and started over in a new city, one with cheaper rents and fewer cars. He got along for awhile. Everyone waved to him and said hello. He learned how to wave back. After he moved into his new…

They boarded the crowded train in Kenosha. Marjorie sat in the only empty seat. Next to a sailor. The sailor smiled. Marjorie smiled. Will stood in the aisle. He held Pearl in one arm and the stroller with his free hand. He carried an overstuffed backpack. A diaper bag was slung over a shoulder. He…

Why are the whales all throwing themselves up on the beaches; do they not know by the scraping of sand on their belly, by the flush of air along their flanks, that this is not the place for them? Can they not feel, as the water recedes, that they need to twist and thrash their…

Gracely stumbled off the train and onto a rickety platform. The low clouds above her had the shape and color of oyster gills. The station was surrounded by a vast prairie of eight-foot high grassland. To Gracely, it felt like standing at the bottom of a shallow cave. The train’s arrival had silenced the songbirds,…

Translated by Tim Cummins 1 In the cooling evening, the convoy lurched along. At every hairpin bend the lead car honked their horn to alert people coming the other way of our presence. Someone got out and started vomiting up their aperitif. My wife stuck her head out the window but couldn’t make out who…

When she returned to Dauphine Street after the funeral, she removed the draperies from every window of their monstrous house before she removed even her patent-leather heels, which made ascending and descending the stepladder difficult, even foolish. But she wanted no gossip. Let the whole Marigny regard her life through the clean glass. Let all…

After four months without a phone call or letter, our Uncle returned to Portland on Christmas Eve with a cocktail waitress he had covered head to toe in fresh mud. He’d done the same to himself except he’d added a humble sash of maple leaves and was also wearing a helmet made of twigs, and…