When I was a child, my mother worried that I would eventually abandon her for the company of friends. But when I still had not made a friend by the end of the second grade, she worried about my social …
Fiction
There Is an Angel Inside Me I’m Constantly Shocking
A carer’s life is boring. Working day in and day out for months, years. Watching over their employers like collies, ever hopeful to spring into action at the first sign of trouble, to be useful, to be heroic. Only this …
Starbaby Blooms a Tuber Rose (excerpt)
When the pops walked into my room, he saw the One-Who-Got-Away’s underthings spread across the floor with jars of moths on top of each one, and that’s why we had our little accident. I didn’t think he was coming home …
Old Houses
Congratulations to Allison Alsup, whose story “Old Houses” won an O. Henry Prize! This story was originally published in issue 38.1 of the New Orleans Review.
The O. Henry Awards have been awarded for nearly one hundred years, honoring …
Bundle
My mother removed my legs and wrapped them in cheesecloth—no lint—before putting them in the top drawer of the bureau beside my crib. “Tell me the story again,” I displayed on the message screen embedded in my chest.
“We had …
The Kingdom of No
Lamy, New Mexico, 1920
It was so early in the morning that the light could hardly be called light, and an unseasonable frost lay over the ground like a warning. Hector Olivares, esq, sat in his automobile, holding tightly to …
Taffy of Turvyland
The whole thing—to do it and to bring her here, home where the back room is empty, clean, with burglar bars covering windows on banana plants in the alley, all that: Jon’s idea. We’ve laid in a supply of Depends …
The Scar
I have a friend who has always been thin. Both Sasha’s parents, well into their fifties, are lanky, and, for as long as I have known Sasha—into our earliest years of schooling—her parents have been this way, pale academics, who …
Bandana
My father wears dark bandanas. That’s his thing. The one time I saw his head without one, I was ten, passing by the cracked door of his room, and there his bare head was, like a floodlight, round and direct …
The Last Eunuch
In the afternoon three things happened to bother me. In order:
1) I read a Times article about the last eunuch of the Chinese emperors dying alone in a Beijing temple. Most eunuchs had saved their “three precious” in jars …
