Out in the Haitian countryside we came upon, I guess, a mud puddle, but it was an enormous Haitian one and there was no getting around it. It was just the two of us, me and Ti-Jacques, and I remember …
Fiction
The World Seems to Fall Asleep But It’s a Lie (excerpts)
Storm
What he really liked most was to see the storms coming in. His house was safe and most of the villagers went there to seek shelter. Some would cry from fear and others tried to hide their sadness from …
School Nurse
I always thought I was sick. I’d turn my head toward the window where the wind chimes swayed and beneath them baskets of crayons, the teapots we couldn’t fill with tea. Just cold water, they’d tell us. There was a …
Believers
The hole appeared overnight, at least three feet deep, two feet wide, and two feet long. It was as if someone had taken a shovel and dug a grave in the backyard. That’s what it looked like, Marty thought. A …
The Lesser Peach Tree Borer
Muscular, hairy, and naked to a fault, the man and the woman gazed at one another with the dead, painted eyes of storefront mannequins. If this was love, and nobody could say otherwise with any certainty, then it was onanistic …
Auschwitz Crumbling (excerpt)
OŚWIĘCIM, Poland—As they do on every anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, witnesses to the Holocaust will gather Sunday, older, frailer, fewer than the year before.
After 68 years, the camp itself is showing its …
Hen’s Teeth (excerpt)
My mother is not a liar but sometimes I wish that she could be. At school I tell a lie or two ocassionally because it changes how the girls feel about me, what they think. I don’t tell bad lies, …
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 …
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? …
