Fiction

“I tell you, ah girl,” said Auntie Mel, “once you give birth your entire world will change. All the things you thought were important—career, money, even your husband lah—become secondary. Motherhood will become you. Listen to ah yi.”

My mother couldn’t help but chime in. “Yeah yeah. Once I had you everything else melted away.”

Near the end of August my father drove me to the Amtrak station in White River Junction. He bought me a yogurt, egg salad sandwich, and granola bar at the co-op, counting his change before putting it in the pocket of his jean shorts. The store-bought lunch made me feel guilty and sad. So did […]

In those last days, before the world ended, Lucia Salvador Calderón lived by the lists she made. Her blessings became inventory. She wrote them down to remind herself: she had the banana tree in the backyard; she had the ceramic tiles on the bathroom floor, cool against the soles of her feet; she had the […]

God disappears on a Tuesday afternoon and no one even notices. Business proceeds, the stock market stays level, the news stations don’t catch wind of it, and parents pick up their children from school and feed them Cheetos, fine, if they’ll just be quiet. No strange weather announces the departure—it’s been raining since morning and […]

I start project ‘three-months-in-the-hills’ aboard Nilgiri Mountain Railway’s toy train, the eucalyptus-laden mountain air and the spice-scented tea plantations quickly stir up long-forgotten memories. Two years ago, Sheena had suggested a day trip to a nearby vineyard. Somewhere between gazing out across the endless rows of vines and sampling the six local wines, we learned […]

To have survived my womb, the egg must have been recycled from some previous life. It was mottled like a chicken’s, constellated with birthmarks I had spent summers smothering with fleshy spray paint to sell at my mother’s stand; it wobbled like frogspawn, a palmful of jelly that I had been looking forward to since moving back, tadpoles bursting open with the magnolia.

‘Cimera ha?’ he said. And I almost cried to hear my language for the first time since I’d left home.  Then he said, ‘Don’t bother replying, I won’t understand if you do. I looked up how to say it after we spoke last week. Just tell me how you are in English.’

They had not had sex in years, but this did not bother Marla. If she were to walk past the same brook every day and watch it ebb away, it would not strike her as a horror. Only sudden changes, extreme and violent, suggested horror. Hurricanes, droughts.