Browse Sections
Fiction
The Man Who Found You In The Woods
She was not defying his judgment, but asking him to consider, for a moment, her own. You must come, she said. You must. For the first time in the seven years he’d owned her, Nathan obeyed his dog. He came when she called him.
October 2001I Am Bangkok Ut
“Sawadeekah. I am Ut. Number 32.” I have been saying this for two years now. Two longlonglong years. Enough to grow a callus in my private part.
October 2001Koscinski’s Opening
Koscinski brings another excuse today. Always, he brings an excuse. This morning he tells his teacher Lazlow that the dog ate his hearing aid.
September 2001Scarlett In Harlem
The needle bit my skin and then nestled into a vein: a clean hit, running through me like the Orient Express. New York heroin is like Daddy holding you and kissing you on the neck. It’s white, not dark and red like the Mexican heroin that I’d shot back home. It tastes like the sweet breath of Buddha.
September 2001On The Lake
This was early in the morning, the day after Thanksgiving. My grandfather wore a tan cotton jacket and an old-man’s hat almost the same color. He sat at the wheel of a 1948 Ford he had bought and painted himself. You could look at the lime-cream color from twenty feet away and see the brush marks. He turned the key, glancing at me with the beginning of a smile and with a squint — against Kool smoke — that looked like a wink.
August 2001Jingling Bracelets
Saïd awakens at three in the morning and has a cup of strong coffee and some leftover couscous from the night before. His children are still sleeping in the mud house, but his wife has been up for a while to get the fire going and make the coffee. The two of them sit quietly beside the fire. She yawns, waiting for him to leave so she can go back to sleep. He has a long walk ahead of him, at least six hours.
August 2001Realism
About your opening: editors often judge a story by the first paragraph, and yours has no hook. Take the description of the father: his soap-encrusted wedding band, the blue tennis shoes he wears with suit pants and tropical shirts, the fading hair that crests above his forehead — these are all fine, specific details, but they come too soon and contribute little or nothing to the narrative. Always keep in mind that writing fiction is about choices, painful choices.
July 2001Due To Illness
Raymond’s in the same “promising” eighth-grade section as me — the promise being based on some test we took at the end of seventh grade — but I don’t think of Raymond as promising. Nobody does. He wears high-water pants, and his glasses are held together with masking tape. He has a scattering of white pimples on his forehead, beneath his greasy bangs. Sometimes he smells.
July 2001Ecstasy
I suppose it might make sense at this point in my life — with a wife and a son and long afternoons of contentment drawn around me — to disavow my passion for Solange. Or, at the very least, to relinquish her memory. But you don’t relinquish anything when you’ve fallen in love, no matter how briefly. The heart writes in indelible ink.
June 2001The Symptoms
The second time I come to see her, she lets me touch her right breast. I’m sure she would let me touch the left one, and maybe slide my hand down her smooth belly, but the idea is too much for me. She strokes my arm as I hand her the fives through the window, just barely brushes her fingertips along the inside of my elbow. I roll her nipple between my fingers, run my palm over the breathless curve. I want to stop.
June 2001
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today