Papa’s Death and the Orphan Train No matter how many times Horace told her different, Eliza knew her brother was wrong. The woman in the woods didn’t look the least bit dead. The woman in the woods looked beautiful. With her long flowing hair and a leaf-gold cape, she made Eliza think of an ancient…

Mu wakes up in a comfortable bed, in a room with blue walls, next to a woman who snores softly with her back turned to him. He props himself up on his elbows, scanning the room through sleepy, half-closed eyes. The woman turns her head. He can see the profile of her face; she is…

I thought I heard someone being murdered. What can I say — that’s what I heard. I woke my husband up. “Get up,” I said. “Someone’s being murdered.” “Carly, please,” Ted said, turning over. “Come on, please.” He said it sort of like a moan, like he might be asking for something else in another…

for Helen Lampkin 1. Cat What does one do with her hair for a date of catfishing in the Untethered Lagoon? These were the days before the proper ponytail and permanent, and pomade would sweat and drip. What Jo-Alice did was take her hair, straightened by a hot iron comb with thinly-spaced teeny teeth, and…

“Sonny,” she says. “What was I thinking?” she says. “Thinking you don’t know until you know,” she says. “That’s what I was thinking,” she says. “It’s here now, Sonny,” she says. She points to the box and packing material on the floor. “See for yourself,” she says. I step in. “Maybe not for everyone, if…

The last time I was near a volcano it was in Hawaii and this guy was trying to get me to go on a helicopter ride over Mauna Loa on the Big Island and look at the lava. No thanks, I said, and told him how a few months back one of those helicopters had…

It was hard to sleep in Glen Grove because the nurses kept our room doors open all the time and one of them walked in every fifteen minutes to make sure you hadn’t killed yourself. On my sixth night there, they brought in a new roommate around 4 but I wasn’t really sleeping too well…

My heart races against the tomato in my shirt. The game: what can I fit without anyone taking notice? What can I add to myself and make it look like there’s less? A cucumber can fit almost anywhere if you’re determined enough to take it so I make to look like I’m tying my shoe…

Upset? Of course I was upset. You loan a guy your snow shovel. Small favor, common courtesy, it’s January, he’s your neighbor, no big deal. But then the snowstorms come, three feet overnight, and his sidewalk stays un-shoveled, and you’re stuck with a regular dirt spade. And then, next day, it’s another two feet of…

Translated by John H. McGlynn We drank our coffee on the back terrace of the house. Tante Surti now seemed to be ready to give her testimony. She positioned herself on a chair facing the camera, a sign that we could begin. Before starting, I told Tante Surti that if at any point she began…

It began in the aftermath of the hurricane, when the air smelled like wet earth and D felt like he was drowning in it. For two days, the wind had uprooted the rainforests and levitated the mangrove trees. Crabs ended up where birds lived, and jellyfish lay pulsating on the highways, humming with purple electricity.…

Translated by Roland Glasser In praise of a night of transgression, followed by Lucien and the Diva’s reading. Not all nights had the same chronology of beer, music, dancing, single-mamas in the first flush of youth, dog kebabs, and madness. Those who went out at night knew the plot, the prosody of events, the convulsion…