It is amazing how some things never change. Where we grow older, crawling from youth into adulthood and all its attendant responsibilities, some things remain unfazed, unbothered by passing years—perhaps even existing out of time—as though its sole purpose is to anchor you to a particular moment, a particular memory, a particular place. As I […]

There is beauty in fundamental things, and nothing is more fundamental than destruction. I could watch a forest burn, or a field, or a house, for hours. I can still smell the smoke. It’s taken residence in my nasal passages, and I can’t get it out. I liked setting fires when I was little, and […]

1. A Ring And isn’t that sweet? Isn’t it just too perfectly sweet, like it’s a message of hope left for me and Alice, a blessing for our life together? I caught the ring with the edge of the broom as I was sweeping out the kitchen. It scraped along the tiles and made a […]

A river wails. At noon, a heartbroken sky. Clouds above fight and break up, las nubes fall apart and so rain pours on a valley of Quito. Their white heavenly bodies unfold into the Machángara river, and el río gurgles and swallows the sky whole. It feeds off heartbreak, this river of shrieks. Quiteños who […]

Who’s to say why a man does what he does? Hunter Wilson was seven when his parents emigrated from New Zealand to the U.S., but he still remembered with nostalgia the wooly clouds of sheep that drifted across the emerald hillsides, hard work to care for, but what life doesn’t involve hard work? Hard work […]

Karl is twelve years old, and he runs across the grass, body weightless, energy boundless, alive in a way that only a boy on the cusp of adolescence can be. It’s night in July, the country air cool but still humid, and his skin is coated with sweat. He’s in the front yard of his […]

He keeps pressing the button for the umbrella to fall after the rain and it does. It comes down with a mighty force, down on his head, enveloping him like a predatory jaw. It covers him, then smothers him, then it consumes him. The umbrella snaps down on his head, spikes through him clean, clamps […]

There was no body for the wake. We stood by the open grave and watched as the men lowered the plain ʻōhiʻa wood coffin. There was a large banana stump inside, symbolic of my mother’s body. Reverend Parker had been hesitant to do this because it seemed too close to the ignorant Hawaiian superstition that […]

The belly of a clown is filled with cotton candy and cola and colored flags. That’s what my cousin told me when we found the big dead clown. Clowns weren’t people. They were creatures, symbols, agents. We found one, belly up, floating in a stagnant pond near a culvert. Mountain Dew bottles and cigarette butts […]