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 […]
I snap awake and focus on a sheet of paper taped above my bed. It reads “Get Going, Lily Sandoval.” In ten minutes I’m down the stairs dressed. Move like the person behind you is catching up. I’ve done that since I was eight, when my father and I jogged around the park. At twelve […]
I met him in a parking lot. He was unattended, headlights lifted up to the sky, wheels slowly turning, going nowhere. As I leaned over him to place my hands on his body, his hood ornament snared my cross, and his wheels stopped spinning. It was not raining, but his wipers drew slow half-circles on […]