“Now, when you go out of the house,” I say to my two new American students, “You move your object to the lower shelf.” I put the pewter fish on the lower desk shelf to show them. “You see? Here. I am the fish, so when I leave, I put it here.” The white girl is nodding, but the black one looks confused. Liz. Kiara. I must learn their names. “And when I come home, I put it again on the top shelf, like so.” I demonstrate. “Okay? You understand?”
Fellowship
That should have been the end of it. An unexciting stop on an otherwise interesting journey. Unfortunately, I had not kept an eye on Ruby. While the rest of us had been gnawing fried bread and swatting flies, she had been chatting away with our hosts in a manner that was far too loose and animated to be strictly decent from a Kyrgyz perspective. They seemed taken with her — the man, his mother, his sisters, and his aunts. So taken that when we all stood up to go, they said she should stay.
Trawlers
They went every Friday. It was something he looked forward to at the end of a hard day at the end of a hard-earned week. Not something they had to discuss. Five o’clock would come. Flora would put on a nice dress—maybe the pale blue one that uncannily matched the...
Tiny Baba
Baba was tiny. Not short—diminutive. So tiny she had to sit in a booster seat at the table. So tiny she had to hold my pinky as we walked, even in her five-inch platform Mary Janes. You could barely hear Baba, she was so tiny and far away. She would...
Wandering
I’m lying on a gurney, being wheeled down a long hallway with overhead fluorescent lights, while chewing on—what I think—is a tooth. If I had to guess, then maybe a bicuspid, the ones in between the canines and molars. A nurse with short curly brown hair is holding my hand,...
In Dayton, Ohio, in 1919
Paul married a stenographer. A girl from church with ice-blue eyes and sandy hair braided in the modern way. He was nineteen, assembling pumps for Barney & Smith, the giant rail-car maker. They talked about things over tea. Big things in low voices. They liked the idea of in-laws and...
Gingersnaps
That Andrew ventured into the guest room at all was unusual. It was the room where his daughter from his first marriage stayed when she visited, and he thought of it as hers. He always suspected she would intuit any betrayal of her privacy and add it to the tab...