Genre: Fiction

“All I ask is that you behave,” Roman says as he gets ready to step out. 

“Please.” 

He is a new lecturer with a one-year contract in the Slavic Studies Department at Alabama University, which has tasked him with coordinating …

Men are coming to take Mom’s bed. 

Her quilts and blankets and sheets and throws are covered with cigarette burn holes. I strip the bed and fill four big black garbage bags and cram them in her closet whose door …

With gratitude to Pu Songling

Before the fur handbag, gorgeous Canton Therien would never look at me. I had a massive, irrepressible crush on her that must have shown in the way I stared. I knew my staring was …

That was the summer I fell in love with two men no one could tell apart. “The twins,” people called them, though they were not twins, were not even related, and also, they didn’t look that much alike. We were …

The first time I saw Salim, the weather report called it one of Karimnagar’s hottest summers. Streets bore silence like a curfew. Cows belched and jutted out their tongues for moisture. The ice cream vendor rolled his cart into the …

Go Hyunjin graduated from college, took a job as a team secretary at an insurance firm, and got married. The man she married was an actuary. Hyunjin wasn’t responsible for his division, but they worked on the same floor, so …

I.

My madrina and I right away got a truckload of watermelons from a neighboring rancho, to keep us hydrated for the two months we’d be working. We—me being a twelve-year-old boy but strong like a freaking tiger homie, she …

While Mr. Osagie slept, his wife, Maria, lay in chains at the foot of the bed, where he’d kept her for three days now. She’d tried to wrest herself free on the first night, the chains grating and scarring her …