Nonfiction

1. My desire to have a baby and to not have a baby is what makes me feel sorry for Donald Trump. Babies do the best they can, because first, more than any other fact of their identity, all they care about is survival. They learn to survive and then, much later, they learn to […]

This queer woman who found god in the woods— I’m always trying to believe her.

Omens and dreams and their designated decipherers played an important part in naming children in pre-Islamic Arabia through practices refashioned in every era that persist today. A Prophet whispers to a grandmother, and another Muhammad is born.

At last call, she leaned over. I regret leaving, she said. I always have. You nodded, vision blurring with tears, scribbling ink on a napkin: Maybe leaving is a kind of loving.

He hadn’t needed to handcuff her, but he wouldn’t have been able to anyway: the cuffs would have slipped over her hands.

“It’s Gram, Bud. Gram died.” 

His eyes open. He looks into me.

“You did so good, Mom.”

I think part of what I liked about math was simply that it seemed like a sure thing, as sure as a thing could be, a solid mass of true and rigorous and irreproachable knowledge that I could grab like a pole on a bus.

I felt as if I were glimpsing the making of a movie I had seen a thousand times before—the boom microphone crowding into the frame for an instant, the wide canvas of blue sky suddenly wheeled into the wings. I peered through the doorway to the living room and found Mario seated on his reclining chair, absorbed in the copy of Clarín splayed before him, his glasses clinging to the tip of his nose.