Fiction

Winter 1977
An apartment on Postgatan, Porjus
The telephone rang

Here was Cyrus at the door on a Saturday, unannounced and with a leather duffel hanging from each arm, asking to crash for a night or two—three at absolute most.

In 1906 Horatio Applewood watched a white man slip a Belgian Browning, a five-shot rifle, into his father’s hand as barter for a rowboat he had built from scratch.

The ants arrived on Marfa’s first night at the ranch. They crawled into her bed in ceaseless organized columns. The creatures were harmless and died easily between her thumb and forefinger, but kept coming, and Marfa could not sleep

Light cut through the darkness that filled the nave, rousing Pastor Kane from sleep.

An itinerant photographer has set up his camera, lights, and chair in a local grocery store. This was many years ago. I was there, I saw it myself.

The day she decided to leave her lover, Romina was sitting in a plastic folding chair brought from home and waiting for her mother to be released from emergency services.

They were gathered in a field, six boys, playing a game he didn’t know.

Pes mou, the driver said to us at the taxi stand, leaning against his car, all bored and beautiful.

Oksana and Ruslana, Ukrainian girls playing in the streets of Lwów: dolls and sticks and rope. Sunup-sunset, never a cloud in the sky, even when it rains. Always tying and buckling one another’s shoes. When they fall or get scraped, they...