Tag: Short Story

“If ideas are discarded when no longer modish, could we not do the same with unfashionable words?”

How can you have thoughts without words? The man turned back to his coffee and drank. It was cold. Breakfast was done. Time to move on.

I resolved to stay close to my mother.

She described their world at last in a language that they recognized as true.

It’s a thing about being a man. To be so stingy, to deny even a sip of yourself. To deny and deny and deny until one day it all comes out as a violence, like water spewing forth from a hose. 

When you weren’t sure if a guy was gay, you asked if he was Canadian. The straight ones always look puzzled, and told you they were American.

We knew language better than anybody, how you could crack it out of fortune cookies or loop it into a rhythm or rip it to shreds and make money off the confetti. 

What do the dead owe the living?

A finalist for the 2022 Boston Review Aura Estrada Short Story Contest.

“In the East, it is the cow that animalizes the man. Hence, the native occupies this intermediate space between man and beast, which we term ‘savage.’”

The world never really ended. An apocalypse wasn’t an end so much as a change of state, ice into water.

“I will be a tightrope walker,” she said, “and I will walk across the air to you.”

“Most were drills. Pilots weren’t to know which were the real deal. They were not to think of the lethal effects of their duty.” A pilot is pulled aside by a desperate woman seeking help.

This is my version of the story, but I will illuminate only a corner of it, one that ran parallel to and underneath it, revealing what was left in its wake.

“Abroadness became my obsession.” When a young Nigerian girl is invited to go live with her uncle in Canada, it sets in motion a peculiar friendship with someone she has long envied.

“You can’t go to Mass like that.” A woman’s mother wakes up dramatically transformed, leading to a reappraisal of their relationships.

“She stuffed spinach in her mouth until her teeth were a hayish green.” A woman’s extreme diet earns praise from church friends but concern from her family.

“When I flick the light on, my ceiling hangs open, a wide mouth.” After her bedroom springs a leak, an English professor tries to help a struggling student.

“She would sit upright in her bed and recall the moment she saw Aisha’s face.” An Iraqi émigré explains to a New York doctor why she has enrolled in a study for a new antidepressant.

“I was my father’s son. My father was Nai Nai’s least favorite.” A Taiwanese American man, driven from home by a secret, reevaluates his childhood memories of his grandmother.

“Closing her eyes, she pictured Abbie in the funeral home.” Grieving the death of her best friend, a young woman travels to Singapore to stay with an aunt she barely knows.

"Never do unto me what your uncle has done to us." A family member's disappearance leads to personal revelations. 

“My mother has not slept for seven days.” A Taiwanese woman’s brother avoids calling their mother, setting off an insomniac unraveling.

“‘No,’ Miho said, shaking her head. ‘I don’t want to share.’” Private tragedy forces a New York woman into attending group addiction therapy sessions.