The girl is not real. She’s known it for some time now. Since she learned that most little girls don’t practice their words and smiles in a mirror; don’t feel the tingling of the fluorescent lights; don’t linger on the edges, always watching, searching for the rules...
Dolly churns ewes’ milk until her palms blister red, fills her paper-lined pockets with soft and pliant butter, smuggles it out of the dairy before the rooster calls in dawn. Father doesn’t notice the loss. While he goes to market, she crawls through the knot at the...
Our father won’t want to die. But he is curious, and I will see it when he finds a seam while everyone is sleeping and slips through. Our father won’t want to die, but there will be the time we are all called at four am, Traumahawk having scraped him from the road,...
Peter did not come home for the summer. We were dealing with it, his father and I. We knew how he felt about her, and we were happy. But the farm was too quiet. The kitchen was too clean and the handrails too polished, and most nights we could only talk of him and go...
I find one of your old contact lenses in the bath mat. Feel it under my big toe. A tiny ship. A coracle. Netted by some pubes and fibers. Has it really been that long since I shook out the mat? You hated its shag. Said it felt like stepping out of the bathtub onto...
Madhavi and I always race through the stone alley behind our houses to the makbara. The alley is rough; once I tripped and split my chin open. Five stitches. Since then, I don’t run fast. Madhavi wins the races, but I climb the monument quicker. We call it a monument,...
Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926. Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches. I’m in the ochre of it, the end of morning. The light is thick, impasto, nearly edible. Across the courtyard I hear a woman singing to someone. What is the song? I keep looking at my body—how is it...
She first appears as a pale-yellow blur in the darkness, her figure solidifying as I approach, all taffeta and ribbon. Her extended thumb seems to glow, accentuated by a dainty white glove. She looks normal. Human. So tangible that I laugh as I pull onto the shoulder,...
The bird was wild with fear. Entangled in the fishing-rod line—wings awkwardly stretched, feet dangling mid-air—it leaped and bounced and swayed, a puppet on a string dancing a macabre pas de deux over the wordless song of the waves. More frightened than the bird, the...
The dumb bomb that dropped on my mother’s house did not explode. Instead, it flattened the dinner table and severed the left leg of my uncle. He had just finished eating a bowl of chè đậu trắng, my favourite dessert, when the roof caved in on them. It was not an...
What did the octopus know? Each day at work, when Alice fed it or cleaned its tank or gave it some item to keep it busy—a rubber dog toy, a teething ring—she wondered. She watched its eight roving arms moving around the enclosure, all independent from whatever was...
Now let us consider the problem of the man with three children and one fig tree. In the Talionis Commentaries we find a man whose will ordains that each fig be split into three equal pieces. This solution is just but impractical. The Annotations of Marduk speak of a...