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...
Ma keeps Nabh home again because he’s still fatigued, and she says he has such heavy bags under his eyes he could go for a month-long trip to India. No fever, though. He’s well enough to be bored. And … he’s going to miss the fire drill today. No big...
She wore her bones like silk. Not with shame, but with memory. Each rib a prayer. Each vertebra a vow. They had once dressed her in red silk and called her divine. They used to carve her name into temple stone. Midwives and mourners and those who bled for too long...
Overnight, the lake reveals itself. We wake to the sudden beating of its body against our properties. The sudden beating. The sudden beating. At first, we ignore it. We see it but pretend not to. Like we often do with our neighbors. But then our pets begin to...