I should start by saying that I did not care for my younger sister Helen. She had been raised by my father to be loud and rude and selfish, and heedless of the feelings of others. Even so, she was my sister, and we endured each other as siblings often do. After our father abandoned […]

Sorrow I’ll tell this first part of the tale as you told me, dear brother, since you can’t bear to tell it anymore. Not even to yourself. I want you to understand how things came to this pass. Brian Coin, that black-haired boy like a rail-thin raven, saw him too, you know, walking through the […]

Its windows had been facing the Pacific the first time she saw the house—a two-story wall of glass like the rest, all glittering beacons on cliffs dark with trees. The gray water below frothed into white crests, dashing and drooling between teeth-like formations along the cove. Marta Montejo closed her eyes and tightly gripped her […]

The grass died that sweltering, fey summer, and the wildflowers, and the garden tomatoes, and the corn maze Dad had planted in the top field. (Mam said he’d been watching too many American movies; Dad said we had to keep the lights on somehow and everyone had a gimmick these days.) The canal that ran […]

Pot boiling. Vegetables chopped. Rice cooking. Meat marinated. Stream drifts outward from the mosquito screen of the cracked open window of our single room unit nestled in a stray corner of Chinatown, Toronto. Newspaper crinkles under my fingers, ink seeping into the skin in dark smudges as I kneel to smooth out the folds across […]

Crossing through the woods on the edge of the waste ground she heard it screaming in the night and at first she thought it a child or a young woman, in extremis: wordless, chopped-up glossolalia of pain, somehow finding breath to start another shriek even before the preceding had finished tearing its way free of […]

It began with a tickle in the back of Wong An’s throat, light as a goose feather. She let out a long, rasping wheeze, and would have thought no more of it. But her son, Chen Wei, recently returned from his apprenticeship with Doctor Song in Peking, gave her a long, searching look. When he […]

Father did not look like himself in his uniform. There was deception in his navy encasing, like the fabric was hiding something. Some accident, moreover, in the cut of the slacks made it look like there were diapers underneath. That couldn’t be right. Was that really Bridget’s father, under those slacks, that jacket? “Step right […]

In the north. In the night. A remote cabin. Quiet. Empty. Or so we thought. Imagine a writer, alone and isolated in a secluded cabin in the north, in the blue-dark of night, struggling with this story. Or—imagine yourself here, instead. Cold and alone in the near-dark. Because despite our best efforts at keeping the […]

There was no great trauma that attended (what some later called) Mary’s descent, unless this counted as one: her husband, taking her for a ride on a camel on their honeymoon in Egypt, twenty years ago, and the ornery, swaggering animal shrugging him off and spitting on him as he struggled to find his footing […]