Short fiction

The fate of these galaxies is as clear as two lovers meeting for the first time, their lives assuming trajectories as ineluctably convergent. They gather momentum; the attraction between them grows. Any onlooker can predict their eventual collision. What is less clear, unfortunately, is what happens after that.

Cesar has been waiting to join his family in America since he was twenty-two, when his parents took his younger brother and left without him, promising to send for Cesar as soon as they could. They had no choice, he says. They wanted to emigrate legally, to be able to vote and pay taxes and go to hospital without fear of deportation. And while he may well scoff these days at such a bourgeois ideal of "normal life," Jimena knows he will never fault them for embracing it - because imagining them as mindless slaves to the prevailing ideology is less painful than admitting them any agency. At least this way, he need never wonder why they left him behind.

🏅 Nominated for a Pushcart Prize

The lobby was filled with the rich scent of roses. For months after Ian's brief, youthful folly was over, his lease broken and his notice given and his account at the club closed, he would remember that soapy, floral smell - how it contrasted with the frenzied stench of Midtown on a warm evening, and those few mornings when, riding the elevator down from the guestrooms, he would catch a whiff as the polished brass doors slid open.

They sought out a pay phone to call Bea but found twenty others waiting, the line barely moving, and after fifteen minutes they drifted towards a nearby bar instead. A small television there had attracted a news-feed vigil, which they joined, squeezed in between two ashen-faced men in Yankees hats, as that awful, inexorable filmstrip played in endless repetition: collision, collapse, collapse. Collision, collapse, collapse.

When Billy got busted for screwing students, the rest of us weren't that surprised - but outside immigration, it was the talk of the airport. The baggage handlers were gossiping, and the airline staff, and the flight mechanics too. Even Juanita and Cosmo at the Terminal B Dunkin' Donuts weighed in.

The evening after my MRI I'm on the balcony again, laying out silverware on the table. It's been a balmy afternoon for May, so I stopped by Borough Market on the way home for the makings of an alfresco dinner. I got a bit carried away. As I walked from stand to stand the air seemed to disappear, replaced by my now familiar wooziness and the mishmashed smells of a thousand different foods: Stilton and strawberries, coffee beans and cured meat, potato peel and pistachio shell and fecund, foamy yeast.

Vanessa, when the bomb went off, was adjusting a strap on her sandal, kneeling down by their car's passenger door while Didier circled to the driver's seat - so while the blast flung him up and backwards, she flew only a few inches, her right shoulder slamming into the side of the car.

It's just me and my little girl at dinner tonight, my wife at book club, and neither of us has much appetite. No taste for conversation, either: Ellie stares silently at her soup, occasionally bringing a spoonful to her mouth, flinching, and pulling it away again before it's even past her lips, while I stir shadows in the surface of mine, my tongue pressing against front teeth and my stomach churning, and the sterile white light of the upstairs bathroom buzzing in my head.

My mother disappeared the summer before my junior year of high school - the same year I got dumped for the first time, the same year I learned to drive, and the same year I became convinced that Mr Jennings, my new algebra teacher, was Alex Trebek, the host of the TV quiz show Jeopardy!

Chang's chair was Mom's best find in all her years of junk-hunting. Chang like Chang and Ang, you know 'em? Those Siamese twins? Like, those original, from Siam Siamese twins? The ones who ended up in North Carolina, 'cause when their sideshow passed through they figured the place was some kinda enchanting? (Never understood it myself - I got out when I could. Didn't want to get stuck Pop's whipping-boy farmhand forever.)

Once the storm has lifted, the fridges begin to gather: cautiously, around the edges of the bayous, peeking from between the reeds. They slink, and watch, and wait quietly for their moment - and finally, when the coast is clear, they slip into the bay with a slow, "who, me?" nonchalance, like a teenager creeping home past curfew.