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Swimming in the Flood

January 21, 2025
The call came after midnight. With the rain coming down so hard outside, it took me a moment to recognize Jaz’s voice, which still had that sweet, girlish inflection that she used to work so hard to conceal in her attempts to get them to take her seriously. Hello, she said. Hello, Ed, are you...

Kendra

January 14, 2025
We met Kendra the same way we met all of our father’s girlfriends. In the preceding weeks, my younger brother Austin and I would notice a slight uptick in his humor—whistling, singing, humming, laughing and saying, “No big deal!” when we made a mistake like leaving a carton of ice cream out overnight. He would...

Amreesh Mathur

January 13, 2025
Amreesh Mathur was a short dark man from India who lived in Pittsburgh. He went to the diner and he ate well. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Jello. Chocolate cake. Five days a week he went to work. Two nights a week he went to a class in Intermediate Accounting (he wanted to improve himself). One...

Jumpz

January 13, 2025
The first Jeff heard of Jumpz Trampoline Sports was from his son’s friend’s birthday party e-vite, forwarded to him by his ex-wife Liz, who appended one word—yours—due to the weekend it fell on. He didn’t think about Jumpz again until Liz mentioned it, making a face from behind the wheel, when she pulled up to...

Rabbit, Rabbit

October 29, 2024
One of the first things I gave my husband was the “rabbit, rabbit” incantation. My dad, dead just six months before we married, taught it to me when I was little. If you said “rabbit, rabbit” on the first day of the month before you uttered any other word, you would have good luck. I...

The Game of Life

October 29, 2024
The seniors are gathered in the gym for the Game of Life. The teachers have set up tables along the perimeter with signs like INSURANCE and REAL-ESTATE and RETIREMENT. There’s a chapel with a veil and a top hat on stools where you can get married. A hospital to pick up your kids. But first...

Amongst Believers 

October 3, 2024
Rey liked that Anna May would pick him up from the bus station. But he didn’t like that her father would drive her there. She had told him she could drive, but her father wasn’t comfortable with her facing the wider world on her own. And the hours-long drive, from their small town in northern...

Papi's Dog

October 2, 2024
It had been a sweaty and sticky summer, and even in the first days of October everyone still smelled sweet and a touch rotten, like peaches left too long on the windowsill.   I got the phone call while having drinks with my cohort, walked away from Inu—a visiting post-doc from Alaska—to answer my phone. The...

The Meteorologist

September 19, 2024
My mother calls to tell me my father goes missing for hours every morning. She says, “He wakes up at approximately 5:00 a.m. each day, with no alarm clock, and walks out the door by 5:30. I am worried about him, Michael.” I stand at my kitchen counter, rub my eyes, and fiddle with the...

Collaboration 

September 19, 2024
We arrived at noon, the bar room noisy with chatter. For a moment I tensed, unable to spot a free seat. They’d refurbished the lounge at Christmas, new green-leather chairs and small glass-topped tables arranged in unfamiliar configurations, the pillars of the massive wooden bar, a relic of British times lurking at the back, freshly...

Rotten Teeth

September 5, 2024
Baachan had greeted me at the door when I returned home from school, as she always did. She prepared dinner, and we ate. After cleaning, Baachan watched me study. She couldn’t read but was always encouraging as I worked. “You’re so clever,” she’d say when I wrote a complicated character. “Wow, you make it look...

Chili Padi Girl in a Chili Padi World

August 22, 2024
I have been forced to move too many times. But the process of settling in is always the same. The first priority is to search nearby for a good, affordable Thai restaurant. It is a temporary emergency exit. I have been conditioned by my mother to eat out my sadness; a meal with rich, complicated...