Our family loves television. We watch like it’s our job. Every moment not spent sleeping is for viewing. We watch first thing in the morning, mining sleep pebbles from our eyes. We watch at the breakfast table, spooning soggy Cheerios into our mouths. On the school...
The grandson is put in a cottage near the beach. The ocean. His grandparents told him a grown man has to live somewhere. Somewhere not with them. And twenty-four is grown. The grandfather had been to Korea and back by twenty-four. So the grandson was put in touch with...
If I had realized that blood rushes out of a Caesarean section incision like a wave at the beach, I would have left my new running shoes at home. All of the obstetricians wore rubber clogs, squeaking slowly to make their rounds and squeaking quickly while running to a...
Ma says the beginning of our bad luck was buying a house in a neighborhood owned by stars with no hands. At night, in replacement of wishing upon them, she warns us about the leading cause of death in the United States – half-swallowed ambitions, chewed twice before...
The baby is gone for fifteen minutes. Maybe less. The new access control system does its job, the Code Amber careening loud and shivery through every intercom, and all in all, the affair is neat and abbreviated—a disappointment to the med school gunners looking...
We meet at a fifteen-year-old’s birthday party. You’re attractive in an offhand way. Girls dressed as pop stars with weaponized fingernails giggle as you pass. You catch my eye and smile. We are two in an army of waiters careening under blossoming trees with silver...
They are standing on the woman’s porch. The woman and her friend. They stare at the road in front of them. Empty. And beyond the road, an apple orchard. And beyond that: sky. Night sky. Stars, and a hint of moonrise. The woman is smoking a cigarette. She doesn’t...
First came the click of the front door lock, then the thud of his heavy American shoes dropping to the wooden floor. My silence and sleep were interrupted. I rubbed my eyes and checked the time. Garbage trucks were starting their rounds. 3 a.m.—fourth late night in a...
You are running late to catch the bus to the train to the plane trying to get to your boyfriend who thinks you’re The One but wants to make sure you’ll start to exercise more first, eat less, and somehow you think getting lost is because you are fat and now...
My father brought home strange things: a crumpled five-rupee note, a nose stud, a baby’s anklet. Things the dead no longer need, my mother muttered while grinding rice for idlis. She steadied the pestle, afraid it might slip and bruise her thigh. We lived near Canal...
On our street, the fathers who hunted had sons who hunted. Their rifles and shotguns, the working ones, were never visible, but each living room displayed a weapon from their father’s or grandfather’s past, some heirloom hung over the mantle like a flag that declared...
The one-hour photo smelled of vinegar and metal, the scent clinging to the back of my throat like it might stay there forever. My hands sweated inside the sleeves of my windbreaker as I slid the yellow Kodak envelope across the counter. The clerk, a man with...