Allpa received the magic sword from his grandmother, as she lay dying. “I’m afraid I don’t really need a sword, grandma,” he said. “No, nor do you deserve it,” she snapped at him. She was a fierce old woman with a nose like a hawk’s beak and skin falling away in folds from her cheekbones. […]
I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never come again. I’d regret it if I didn’t go. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued out the pros and cons with Mabel. She […]
Spring festival, before the fish arrive: Teresa Teng croons from the radio; I hum along as I hang paper decorations, the reds and golds bright against our cream-colored walls. You’re in the kitchen making dinner—Shanghai-style sauteéd niangao, braised cod, stir-fried green beans. Sizzle, pop. Water runs from the sink, interrupting the music for a moment, […]
The ride out past Sorintov Station to the monument the soldiers held hostage was bumpy and hot. Every time the sun sank below the horizon during one of its ten daily sunsets, Arkadi welcomed the cooler air, and the quiet. The world always felt more real in the dark. Arkadi sat in the back of […]
In the spring after the war’s end, the soldiers’ spirits began to wander home, and Lady Magdalena bound their lips with cardamom so that they could not speak. “These souls walked for months, their only thought to return home. You must remember, little of their personality remains at this point. They are solid enough to […]
Meerschon Grant Selection Committee— I understand that only one of these proposals you’re reading will be funded. One out of what I’m sure will be hundreds, if not thousands. And that’s just from the research community. Once scholars from other fields learn that this opportunity isn’t limited to the sciences—that they can read the Dead […]
Singapore stank. The last Asian post of the British empire stank. It was a country at war, a country under occupation, and it stank. It stank from the musk of the Chinese men milling on the road, it stank from the sewage cooking in the open drains, and it stank from the diesel burning in […]
I am seventeen. I am in Budapest, and it is the Communist era. At the airport, there were Russian soldiers with Kalashnikovs patrolling the runways. Only one airline flew to Budapest, the national airline Malév. There were few passengers. I stopped at passport control and showed my American passport. It contains a photograph of me […]
I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule— From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime Out of SPACE—out of TIME. Edgar Allan Poe, “Dream–Land” The Poet’s Tale The dreamer, born bleak, invents an existence elsewhere. He tosses in his sleep, his hair tangled. His hands grasp at nothing, and his […]
Aworo, Lord of Horses, god of the Western plains, walked into the marketplace in Kalub in the third hour of the morning. It was early summer, and at this hour the sun was warm and comfortable. Pens of livestock and slaves, rickety stalls, rows of fish staring blankly, baskets of fruit, orange and red and […]