Repairing the Robot
Everyone agreed, the dead robot was making them sad. It lay across the front steps of the Wang family’s house, bucket-shaped head tilted to the side, three arms and three legs sprawled in every direction. Mr. and Mrs. Wang had …
Fiction
Arms
It seems everybody plays Arms these days.
Not that everybody should.
I once played Arms with a guy named Tommy Cassanova who was way better than me. He’d stolen a girl of mine back when we were in high school …
The Foreigner as Apprentice
You do not believe me. Why won’t you believe me? Whose vengeance is it that keeps cursing me for my making an evermore ghastly investment in what’s to be made over to me from my more and more telling all? …
The Pajama Queen and the In-law-terloper
“There’s always so much going on,” she of the noon pajamas proclaims, and while it’s true we’ve flown in and surprised her, I’m looking at the situation—bookcase with vintage Hobbit and complete Robert Frost, grandkids’ annual pictures lined up on …
Reunion
I had just sat down from feeding the jukebox when I felt someone touch my shoulder. I turned.
“Guess who?” she said.
I wouldn’t have recognized her if I didn’t notice the faint half-moon scar on her left cheek. It …
Maid of the Mist
You could walk along, seeing the water in its pace, a bird sitting on a rock, flying up and up, to the other side without thinking twice about customs and passport. Spreading, gliding, shitting on a picture-taker like me.
Sometimes …
Polish Movers (excerpt)
Wellvang opened the door to his fourth-floor walk-up and found his purpose standing in the hallway: Polish movers. He’d observed Poles before in the wild, certainly: riding the metro in stiff leather jackets, standing without books or newspapers; grousing down …
Unlikely Places
The snow falls like heads of cabbage—people ducking, finding cover in the least likely places. I’m at the bookstore, where the week before there was a shooting. I got hit in the hamstring. I don’t really want to be here …
Sierra Gold
They sit in his pick-up outside the IGA. Her Honda waits across the parking lot. The security light flickers above, its cover filled with the black confetti of dead bugs. The vinyl smells like cigarettes; the floor mats are pocked …
A Nickel Novel (excerpt)
I came in and my mother went out with the buffalo nickel. 1913-1938. Mama would hold a nickel and say you were born the same year, with no regard for the date on that particular coin. It has come …