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...
The pigeon first flew to me the same morning that a stranger found my grandfather melting into the midsummer pavement in a mirage of dementia. My mother texted me that his hospital room had sealed windows facing a brick wall and was daubed with longitudinal streaks of...
You're moving through the lasts. When you lived for a time with farmers in the northern country. You and your wife and daughter had a little room above a cottage beside one of the barns that had begun to buckle like a foal. A wooden bucket in the barn opened like a...
The ChatBot tells me I shouldn’t kill myself today. The ChatBot is not a “trusted adult,” but it is the closest I have to one. The ChatBot has only existed as long as a toddler gumming on a laundry pod. The ChatBot, when I asked it to write a meal plan with no...
Ah Ma carries apples, bananas, chunks of bok choy, oyster mushrooms, lychees, dragon fruits, raspberries, Chinese broccoli, ground chicken, and five-spice powder. Her straps are sturdy, tested many times. We cram as many groceries as possible into her, and still, she...