It is not an air raid. Above the city’s steepled church-tops the two planes break from the clouds. Sunlit rain begins to trickle down, and then the smell from wet city streets. The clock tower strikes a warning. “Judita, you had best head home before they begin,” says...
I didn’t have any theater experience, but when I saw the ad for background actors for a local play, I thought it sounded fun: wear a costume, stand in the back, get paid $60 a show. I heard they were taking whoever fit the costumes. The play, it turned out, was...
One Sunday morning, I wake up to discover that both of my daughters have turned into birds. The younger—a tow-headed chatterbox, always sidling up to me when I baked, eager to add a spice of her choosing to the recipe—is a great blue heron stalking around the kitchen...
It was the year the flood washed a parade of homes downriver. They called it a rain bomb. Kate’s home was fourth. She followed three other women, unable or unwilling to leave their homes that once lined the largest river on their tropical island. Kate tried her phone,...
Yes, I saw something. I was making my regular Friday night sauce-and-cheese sandwich. It’s like pizza on an Italian bread. When I went to junior high, Fred’s, the pizza place, sold sauce-and-cheese sandwiches at lunch hour for a dollar; came with a Coke, but now I...
“The air on Mars—what there is of it—is leaking away,” he said. “About half a pound a second sputtering into space. P-p-poof. Stripped away by solar winds.” He was still in bed reading a NASA report in the Sunday New York Times. It was a month since she’d moved into...
●Suit jacket and pants. White shirt. ●Brown knit tie, too narrow, too long. ●Pocket square, folded and stapled into shape. ●Battered Florsheim...
Unsecured in the back seat, I stretched my legs out where my sibling usually sat next to me, preaching about personal space, railing on how much I needed to grow up, give them some room, goddamn it. I’d kicked off my shoes like always, and as the good old country, not...
“The letter opener?” I said to my husband in the middle of the night. “I panicked,” he said, rolling the letter opener between his fingers by his side as if it would disappear. There was a fire next door, but we lived in a rowhome, so there might as well have been a...
But now there are only two brothers and one moon. At the end of my seven-day shift, I hang the blue lantern on my remaining brother’s door. His whole family is awake, to welcome me back and crater him with goodbyes, and the children smell like creosote, like they’ve...
Her name was on the Literature of Mathematics & Economics conference roster, attendee badge plucked from the folding table by the time I arrived. The absence of a nametag confirmed her physical presence, hovering nearby. I wasn't playing that game again. Ancient...
Monday I am reading to Emmeline a story about a man who had no DNA. He had severe radiation damage to his internal organs, this man, a nuclear power plant technician. His immune system was gone, the story says. His DNA couldn’t rebuild itself. With blood in his tears,...