The fat engulfed Mrs. Parathy. It settled around her gold bracelets like a soft brown sludge, bulged out of her sleeves, puffed up around the straps of the expensive, gem-studded slippers she owned by the dozen, made it difficult to walk. Walking was already hard, a slow advance through the overstuffed rooms of her flat, …
The guard opens a dating app during lunch and that’s where he sees the boy. His hair is a shaggy loose curl and his skin is brown like dry soil. He has a tiny scar on his face—a line across his cheekbone. The guard messages him something like, wyd? But what he wants to say …
After Thanksgiving, when our work slowed, we found a fake Christmas tree in the stockroom. We took it to the breakroom and tag-teamed its assembly, removing limbs from the box, passing them around, attaching them to the trunk. We hummed a carol but stopped when we found a clump of plastic greenery that didn’t belong. …
Actually, the most formidable wrestlers of the 1971 Hungarian National Team were not the heavyweights, but Istvan and Gabor, the two lightest on the roster. While preparing for Munich the following summer, after pummeling his practice partner, Istvan would cheap-shot him in the ribs when the coaches walked away. In the changing room, Gabor would …
Twenty years ago, the summer I turned twenty-four, I got a job playing Sebastian the Crab at Disney World. I was coming off a terrible breakup, and I had recently been laid off from my job as a forensics analyst, so I welcomed the opportunity to hide behind a crab mask for a while, until …
The light here, when it’s right, when it’s not a smog-smudged gray, is extraordinarily beautiful, the long, wavery lines of the mountains like water stains on paper. I’m visiting my daughter where she lives near Los Angeles. She seems on edge around me, as if there’s something broken in the next room and she really …
We did meet once in person, the spring of ’96, when I spent a week with my friend Angelica in Santa Cruz. On my last day, the three of us went for a walk along West Cliff Drive. My glances at him were only peripheral, my attention drawn to the surf spots and dog beaches, …
The line through customs moves quickly. A miracle, Frannie thinks, as she retrieves her luggage and exits through the doors into the main part of the airport. The space is all curved lines and gleaming surfaces, black and white everywhere but the seats, which are cushioned in a bright, fiddle-fern green. From the plane, she …
Augusto and Paul stood on a front lawn in a cloud of basement odors, searching through old things. They loved a sale. Augusto ran his fingers over the wrinkled spines of horror novels and mysteries, and Paul wanted dishware from his grandmother’s heyday, if he could find it. The sun burned Augusto’s scalp, but he …
I. Michael leaned over the fence, breathed in the oil and rust of twenty motorcycles. Radiant chrome spokes glinted in the soft winter light. The bikes’ back ends pointed to the sky, seats were smooth or pocked or sagging, shafts were bent or fractured. Michael gazed at indiscriminate litter in the wide sideyard: motorcycles, shards …