Fiction

The day she decided to leave her lover, Romina was sitting in a plastic folding chair brought from home and waiting for her mother to be released from emergency services.

They were gathered in a field, six boys, playing a game he didn’t know.

Sometime before I turned twenty, I was saved twice from dying. Neither time was by my design or choice.

Oksana and Ruslana, Ukrainian girls playing in the streets of Lwów: dolls and sticks and rope. Sunup-sunset, never a cloud in the sky, even when it rains. Always tying and buckling one another’s shoes. When they fall or get scraped, they...

As Álvaro wandered the sweeping courtyard of his hotel, a colonial relic that had been renovated with a pool in preparation for the imminent wave of tourists, he had no choice but to accept the matter for what it was. The situation was...

 Outside the window, other women stare soberly, unchosen. I haven’t just given a person one hundred dollars. I’ve given hundreds of people nothing.

Behold: William’s father slices his mother in half. He shackles her to the bottom of a water tank. He packs her inside a cannon and lights the fuse.

Her grandbabies should be asleep, yet here they are, restless as everyone else tonight.

Once long ago—before Georgia was born, before getting married, in the days when apartments consisted of pee-stained futons and speaker wires tracing across the floor, guitars laid lovingly in their plush cases, overflowing ashtrays, no...

There is no work for Logan, not today, not in this L.A. neighborhood where he’s been wandering for hours. Since the riots began he’s steered clear of the Boulevard, wary of the Guardsmen stationed outside CVS, of the rivers of broken glass...