“What’s she up to now?” Adina asked her fiancé Mike. “Four? Six?” He winced. “Eleven.” Mike’s sister Natalie had attempted suicide on eleven separate occasions, each time using a different method. Cutting her wrists, knocking back three family-size bottles of Tylenol, hanging herself with a hospital bed sheet, jumping into the Columbia River with a […]

Henry didn’t think of himself as an embalmer, not really, embalming was a sort of hobby for him, nothing serious, nothing more than a pastime. If someone asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up he would not have said an embalmer. He would have said an astronaut on most days because […]

The entire village ushers Bina to The Thousand Skin Tent, the men with their lanterns and grave faces, the women with doughy infants suckling bare, sloping breasts. Children dart between their legs, their eyes glittering and wide. They are silent. Yagra told her there would be silence. At the top of The Great Hill, The […]

“You again? You don’t understand ‘no,’ is it? Why you keep coming here?” Mrs. Ong growls, fists propped on generous hips, lipsticked mouth a crimson wound. “Also, what you want me to do with those?” “Put them in a vase?” The man is narrow as a joss stick, with thinning hair and a grave stare. […]