After Guadalupe Nettel’s “Fungus” With my big toe, I pressed down on the bloated bulb of seaweed until a burst of salt air and ocean water popped out of its membrane. Amalia refused to do the...
In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual...
I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said,...
When she opened the door and saw him standing there she was more pleased than ever before, and he, too, as he followed her into the studio, seemed very very happy to have come. “Not busy?”...
“Ah! madame,” replied the doctor, “I have some appalling stories in my collection. But each one has its proper hour in a conversation—you know the pretty jest recorded by Chamfort, and said to the Duc de...
HE KILLED me quite easily by crashing my head on the cobbles. Bang! Lord, what a fool I was! All my hate went out with that first bang: a fool to have kicked up that fuss...
Passing Robitussin, my girlfriend guides the Bronco across the beach with her knee driving the wheel. Driving through night. Through black. She passes it to me. I take it, take some, pass it back. She takes...
It’s late, and I can’t sleep. I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesn’t help. In bed, eyes open, I hear whispers, which makes me think of the president, because we...
Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way of vaudeville. Suddenly...
That’s the way life is: you push a button, and life turns on. —Clarice Lispector Leonora and Adelino were an old-fashioned couple. They had just turned eighty, and they shook with fear when they blew...
I knew that Hertz and his wife could not possibly be home at this hour. I even had a note ready in my purse: “Came by but found you were out. So sorry. Shoshana”. It was...
I DO not know whether this is history which seems like a tale, or a tale which seems like history; what I can affirm is that in its core it contains a truth, a truth supremely...
One afternoon I was sitting outside the Cafe de la Paix, watching the splendour and shabbiness of Parisian life, and wondering over my vermouth at the strange panorama of pride and poverty that was passing before...
Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple. “Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh,...
IT was noon of a bright winter’s day. The air was crisp with frost, and Nadia, who was walking beside me, found her curls and the delicate down on her upper lip silvered with her own...
The summer I fell in love with AI was also the summer I fell in love with N, and the two weren’t unrelated. Early that summer, a machine N had built kept popping up in my...
My husband emerged from the bedroom, woken by the beeps at the end of the washing-machine cycle. ‘Morning . . . Sorry I overslept. Shall I take over?’ The weekend laundry was his job, but since...
On the Night of San Juan, Nana built a gigantic fire. She built it in the middle of the garden, and it was several metres tall. On the Night of San Juan, you couldn’t breathe for...
Welcome to the world! Take a deep breath, cry your first cry and open your eyes. Well done. Now you’re ready to be fed, burped and taken care of. Take your first steps, say your first...
When Britta was depressed, nervous, and restless like this, so not even a complete reorganization of all the furniture in the house, or the preparation of a complicated dinner, could help her, there were only two...
When I came back to Tucson for Christmas break, my mom was like, “You need to clean out your closet or you’re not going anywhere.” This was her way of being dumb about the fact that...
Sometimes strangers come visit, friends of yours, parents themselves. I don’t have any problem with that, let them come, you have every right to invite them. But as long as they do, why do they have...
For Freddie, Brian, John, Roger, and Cătălina It’s complicated, complicated as hell. You fall head over heels for Elisabeta Ciupercă, your sexiest classmate in the eighth grade, a drum solo pounds in your chest cavity every...
Six olives contain as many calories as a small steak. Could that be right? She’d read it out of the corner of her eye in a magazine belonging to a woman in a faded ski sweater...