It’s my birthday when he brings the piñata and the police pull up his driveway. Candy falls. Sweet rumor litters backyards. Hushed tones hop fences. Speculation bikes on wide asphalt. For Sale waves from the porch, punctuating stage center in our living room window. We wave back. The still dialogue inundates cul-de-sacs. Quietude springs forth…
Tengo knew quite well that Japan might drown in the next couple of days. It had been the only thing on the news for the past week; just off the Southern Pacific shore, the Tropical Storm Babe was cooking into the most threatening typhoon to reach Japan in 18 years. Anyone who could leave the…
(A forty watt moon. A throat wrapped with the slow turn of smoke. Her head tilted towards the window. Every night these three things. We were only the angle of nouns… And she is always covered in dusk, I swear it. And I have always been a man with a chest full of hummingbirds,…
“All I have in this world are my balls and my word.” That’s a quote from the movie Scarface that the Geto Boys used as a sample in a song. A song I’d been listening to obsessively for weeks, that ran through my mind that morning as I lay in bed, struggling to face…
Behind the Kfar-Savta soccer stadium, there were fields, empty areas Avichai and I liked to explore. These were swampy, vast, brown spaces that got mud-flooded every time it rained. I lived on one end of the land while Avichai and his family lived on the other. It was a sort of steppe, and often we met in the…
Acting stupid is actually much harder than it sounds. You see, there are certain expectations about being the only woman on a dive tour, and Nell is doing her very best to meet them. Despite knowing a great deal about diving, like knowing that SCUBA is an acronym for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus and knowing…
The two boys high-step through the marsh, one ahead, scanning the forest with deadly seriousness. Ted watches his friend trekking carefully through the brush and attempts to do the same. He pulls at the leather strap of his rifle and nimbly hops a creek to narrow the distance between himself and his friend. His friend…
“Have you heard of the Janissaries?” my great-grandmother would ask every time I visited her in Albania. “No,” I had said the first time. Unfortunately, I could not have my favourite English tea for the duration of the story, because that hasn’t yet been imported into this region. Having tea with milk…
I bring out the old wooden ladder, unsuitable for use, and stand it on my rooftop terrace. The air is moist, but there will be no rain in California. The moon is bright and I am in no hurry, gin at 3 a.m. is not a thing to be rushed. I sip it, lick my lips…
Juliet knew that the rising of the sea had been a slow and precipitous, almost imperceptible, process. But as she stood on the deck of her beachfront home miles away from what used to be the shore, she wondered how all of this had been swallowed up so quickly. She could remember the shoreline, when…
