For Hungry Ghost Month, Sister and I put out bowls of persimmons, plums and freshly steamed buns filled with sweet red bean paste. Mom locks the doors and windows while we sit on a yoga mat, playing Stratego and fighting over the last Hello Panda biscuits. Once a year, we stay indoors. No walking to […]
是你的就是你的，不是你的就不是你的. That’s what my mother always told me. What is yours is yours, what is not yours is not yours. Once, she backed her silver 1994 Honda CRV over a man she didn’t want to love, but he came back to her on his knees, with subtracted teeth and a titanium spine but the same […]
The violin had curves like his mother. Electric guitars hung from wires as if dropped by angels, while trumpets blasted from all four corners of the display window. In pride of place, a glossy red drum kit crouched, motionless, like a heart waiting to beat. Struan pressed his hand-knitted, lumpy mittens to the icy glass, […]
I pick a pattern from the teacher’s sewing book: a single pink-petaled lotus balanced on a thick stem, with big, round leaves on either side. The teacher wears a stern look and spectacles, lenses the thickness of soda-bottle glass. She tells us we must purchase cross-stitch fabric and colored skeins to reproduce the art on […]
If I had to choose, I’d say I’m Luxembourg; small, neat, boxy. Luxembourg’s capital city is also called Luxembourg. Sometimes I think about my brain and how, if the brain is the capital city of the body, my brain must also be called Harrison. The heart is different. I don’t know if my heart is […]
Welcome. Your first day; your first tilting steps off the crooked jetty. It was nearly trampled by the Dawn, but like the island, it still stands. You seem disconcerted, checking your watch and looking upward. No, you’re not imagining it, the sun is now behind you. In retribution for the occupation, the jinn turned the […]
The lock-step of soldiers struck the cracked dark cobbles, a bounding rhythm in time to the beats of Liwei’s heart.A line of people slumped by the entrance to his house. The half-light obscured their faces in shadow, yet he knew their figures even in death.Mama. Baba. Uncle. Old Bingwen.“Ge-Ge,” his sister whined beside him. “I […]
The Miss Marple Society had a reputation. Fans of crime fiction and solvers of small town mysteries, they stuck their noses into Nobody’s Business with all the breezy self-confidence of gossipy aunts cleaning your underwear drawer. An editorial in the Monroe County Gazette had called the Society, “a batty old cave for batty old women,” […]
Her hands give me the first hint something’s wrong. As she pulls up to my drive-thru window, her knuckles are white where she grips the steering wheel. She offers a fistful of singles and coins, exact change for the meager order. “Thank you, ma’am,” I say, divvying the money into the till as I keep […]