Doc Aberdeen looks more like a bricklayer than a doctor. In the front hall he hangs his hat on a spoke. His hair is center-parted so exactly that his white scalp shows through.
I woke on my personal day feeling impersonal. I’d slept long and late, so much I barely recognized the time of day in my bedroom, dust made obvious in the hard light, no job or appointment or interview to rush toward….
You’re clutching your left side when you arrive home late Friday evening. You bring some of the outside cold with you into the living area of the house. Small traces of snow run along the creases and folds in your coat, and flakes thaw...
When Ingrid was twenty-five, she lived for four months in a big house on the edge of an unfinished—never to be finished—ski resort. This was in Montana, on Adelaide Peak, twenty years ago. Richie, her much older kind-of boyfriend, and...
Antje came to Spain three years ago. She worked as a hotel maid in San Sebastián, where she met Mathis and married him. He was a manager at the hotel. He was eight years older. She was twenty-four and had left Germany after her mother died...
In Amsterdam I lived with a man who was always sad. His younger brother had died in a car crash when my lover was sixteen. Though it had been thirteen years since the accident, he carried the loss as if it were an heirloom. He had brought...
The first time he appeared to Pablo was on the bus during the nine-thirty tour. It happened during a pause in the narration while they rode from the restaurant that had belonged to Emilia Basil (the dismemberer) to the building where Yiya...
You hate the way the goats look at you, like you’re a stranger. Even when you walk up with buckets of grain for the last meal of the day. With your mother, they would huddle close and gnaw at the grass stains on her boots. But you are an...
A star-smeared night, the usual briny and humid haze of the brush country in August, and Dixon was hauling twenty cases of stolen toys up from the Rio Grande valley. If the border patrol at the Sarita checkpoint asked, he’d claim a delivery...
