Every year, the ocean pulls itself to either side so that mothers can be reunited with their children. So, that is where we waited, Yi-Jin and I—on Jindo Island. Hundreds of years ago, the small island across from Jindo, called Modo Island, became overrun with tigers that viciously attacked the villagers. Everyone fled to Jindo, leaving the tigers to resort to cannibalism and eventually starve to death.
My bus driver, Pete, wore his hair longer than any adult male I knew, except for my dad, back when he was an honest to God hippy. I have a photograph of my father as a young man, his copper hair cresting his belt buckle, about four inches longer than Pete’s.
Oh god, I never quite know how to introduce myself.
As is chronic to infrastructure, my identity sits at a crossroads. Or, at least, crossroads are the default for our self-definition, the traditionalist’s approach: “I’m the red pin on the map;” “I’m the intersection of 114 and Broadway;” “I’m the first house off the exit.”
It was now half past eight. I had stayed late at the office, finishing up an order for a client. I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. Hadn’t switched my brain off for the night when all I wanted to do was relax. But I had to pick up groceries before I could return home. And the phone was buzzing.
The baby was unexpected: a daughter born to my adopted son and his girlfriend. They kept the pregnancy a secret until the size of Tanya’s belly exposed their deception, leaving me shocked and conflicted, emotions the birth of a granddaughter should not bring.
“Why didn’t you tell us about the pregnancy?” I said, “We could have given Tanya a baby shower.”
They came to Restitution City for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the water that came up out of deep wells in the dry terrain was naturally fizzy, said to contain a higher degree of antioxidants and minerals than the average spring water. Plus, it was easier on the pocket than the foreign waters with the fancy names.
During that last year you had with them, you picked the boy up every day from kindergarten. You waited for the bell to ring under the yellow awning of an oak tree, holding his little sister’s hand. One bag of Cheerios for her to munch on, another to give the boy when he burst through the double doors, skipping, and carrying his latest piece of artwork.
My wife no longer washes her hands when she comes in from the garden. I find traces of earth around the house: dirty fingerprints on the refrigerator handle, last season’s leaves on top of the toilet seat, blood-like drops of tomato juice on the hardwood floor. When we got married, we promised to eat one meal a day together, even if it was just leftovers in front of the TV.
If your dad died on a mountain in Switzerland, blowing an alpine horn, if his anterior cerebral artery ruptured, and your mom told you his final breath flew “joyfully” through the hills, past deer, past goats, beyond trees; if you knew she said that only because you told her three times he was too old to go on that trip
By the fourth day, Claire was no longer surprised when she went to the freezer for ice and found herself face-to-face with six dead gerbils. It was her daughter’s love that had killed them. Emily, all of six years old, had brought them a toxic bouquet of flowers hand-picked from the neighbor’s garden.
I was in third grade the year they legalized guns in school. It happened during spring vacation and Mom took me to Staples for school supplies. She said I could get the small pistol with the little blue daisies on it if I promised, promised, to load the dishwasher every day after dinner instead of just when I got reminded.
Kara is 14 and over breakfast, Cousin Martha comes up, how she got herself in trouble running around with boys.
“No one’s going to buy the cow if you’re giving the milk away for free,” Kara’s dad tells her, not for the first time, or last.
Kara opens her mouth wide, chewing loudly. She moos in a spot-on cow impression.
Now, I will thread my arms through my raincoat and pull on my galoshes. Heave the rucksack onto my back. There is little I’ll miss in this house I’ve been scrubbing for forty years. I’ll hitchhike into the city. Tighten the straps and follow the crow swooping east, head toward the scent of death and rebirth—of decaying leaves composting into moist earth—
When it was summertime and there was no school, Edmar’s cousin, Roanna, and her cat came from the Philippines to visit like they always did but, this time, to get married to his neighbor. Edmar, however, found this strange, as his cousin loved cats and his neighbor, Jeff, did not. “So what,” his father said at breakfast, swallowing his blood pressure medicine with his coffee…
My boyfriend’s reasons for bringing home the fax machine were unclear. The insurance office where he worked was a curiosity of anachronism; Sergei and his colleagues wore wide collared shirts and polyester pants and saved their work on floppy disks. Their office was located in a former Masonic temple, and everything above the second floor was condemned. I was convinced it was a front for criminal activity.
Let’s not read into it, but I got into my first and only car crash the same day I tried to move to the city where you live. I sat numb in the left lane with a bruise across my breastbone, holding up traffic, hood smoking on the hot tarmac until the tow truck came to haul me back home.
It was cold the night Faruq let Narmina go. The draft climbed over his bare legs, sank into his pores and frosted through his insides. He shivered as he sat at the edge of the bed. He bound his knees in his arms, tried to tie up his naked body so that it would disappear into itself and rid the world of its ugliness.
Our new target was local. Considering he was responsible for dispatching close to a dozen of us, motivation was not in short supply. Nor wrath and fury, though we tried to keep our emotions in check, focusing instead on our endgame: we had to avoid scaring Sgt. Robert Ray to death. . .
I have my own personal banshee. Most mornings, usually during my second bowl of cereal, she lets out a soul-melting wail to give me a heads-up on my impending death that day. I used to get worried, but it’s been going on awhile. And I’m still here [. . .]
For Martha Kaas, half the thrill of going bohemian was not letting her husband suspect that she had. She appeared to commute to work at seven every morning but drove the opposite direction from her former life as a middle school math teacher. She parked in a garage in the garment district and spent the day exploring her creative side from within a rented loft space she shared with three artists: Somi, who worked in plaster of Paris; Fango, who altered thrift store paintings by painting in pop-culture characters; and Asia, upstairs, who made the ceiling breathe whenever she brought in her cadre of dancers [. . .]
iPad’s camera adjusted so she was silhouetted, surrounding flat light showing only the outline of a form. Could have been savasana. A cloud moved, another Zoom self-adjustment, there was her face again. But it wasn’t early savasana. No one could go that long without blinking. I threw on a robe, turned my video on, and unmuted myself [. . .]
The low whistle of the northbound train broke a silence made of the shovel’s grating, of birdsong, of the rasp of Eva’s breath. Maud frowned at her daughter, then stepped again on the shoulder of the shovel, forcing the blade into the March soil. This plot of ground, heeled in against a patch of woods, had been worked for garden at one time. […]
Aunt Yangyang was always telling us not to let my mother watch those late-night specials on serial killers. We thought it was because she was worried my mother would get scared, but it was really because she was afraid my mother would get ideas.[…]
Abigail turned to Ben who was sitting on the opposite bed in their shared bedroom. His face was blotchy and red. His mouth was a crooked, downturned line. “Gone?” “He was abducted by aliens,” said Ben. “We’re never going to see him again.”[…]
The most common question I get is how I’m doing. Fine, I say, laughing the whiskey off my breath. They know I’m lying, but they act like I’m not, and that’s all I really want. […]
Lou didn’t need another coffee, but she needed to see her reflection again. The café’s insides were a meshwork of devil’s ivy and Matisse-inspired line drawings. Aesthetics at the end of the algorithm, her sister would call a place like this.[…]
Small circles of blood blossom. The water turns pink. With a quick breath she is all girl again, using her hands to feel the bottom of the tub. It is filled with shattered glass and her legs are bleeding. […]
Between the slurred lisp of her words, Daisy’s mother starts to whisper to her about dead girls. It starts off as a trickle of information, gossipy fascination over the feral, invited by a story on the news or something that her mother heard on the radio while driving […]
I had only seen them once. They’d probably escaped from a botanical garden or perhaps that tree had just been a stop on a journey circumnavigating countries, maybe even continents. […]
Jouma nodded calmly, then got to his feet, excused himself and left the tent, his sons and entourage following in his steps. Today was the wedding of one of his sons, and the festivities could be heard from afar.[…]
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