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 […]

I You tell yourself the story. You tell it over and over. You tell it until it changes from the lies you like to the truth you don’t. But the tale’s in the telling, after all, and the truth will out whether you wish it or no. II It starts with a tea party. Or […]

Four of us adorn the façade. Two inhabit the kitchen. One occupies every bedroom. One peers from each bathroom. Maja Ave, Jericho, was still finding its feet when we came into existence. Initially, we were louvers: aluminum frames with glass slats that tilted like lips, catching the breeze or pressing shut against the rain. Every […]

The naked man stood in the doorway, eyes unblinking. A portion of the left side of his skull was gone, but there was no blood, no gore. Gene tried to outstare him, afraid to look away, and was about to give up from the pain of the attempt when the naked man began to disappear, […]

I was coming out of the entrance when the shot rang out. To be honest it didn’t ring like a bell, it was a thin sound like breaking ice, like the release of bubbles of nitrogen gas in the synovial fluid between my knuckles when I crack them. I have learned a lot about biology […]

She was a lover of history, of the remembrances of generations gone before. She believed it grounded her. It reinforced that she belonged to a time and place of her own, and soothed the rudderless feeling that sometimes swept over her. Recently she had taken to wandering the local graveyard, next to the Church of […]

“It’s not enough to be ugly, right, you freak?” the children would laugh. “You have to live in an ugly house, too.” Every day, Olga heard variations of this cruelty. To her classmates, she and the house were the same thing, as if one explained the ugliness of the other. Throughout her tortuous school years, […]