“May I go out to play in the ruins?” More often than not the answer was yes. I had my favorite spots. A small square of ground wall still standing felt like a house of my own. Another place I loved was the remains of an abandoned garden. Grass and small flowering weeds split through [...]

Blood. I see it everywhere. Nothing strange in that. It has replaced rain and fills the river. Perhaps the world always was this way. Another of the things people see and keep quiet about, as though silence makes it not so. Yesterday, I noticed a child in the square; she was talking to her doll, [...]

Soon, it will be Durga Pujo and I will go to the Hindu Temple. My mother and I will go alone because we do not have anyone else to go with us. And because if we do not go, people will talk. I spent all last night bickering with ma, she insisted I go shopping [...]

Outside there are berries and shadows and strangers. Once when Meredith walked out the door, she heard screaming and crying from the broken window above her head in the neighboring brick building. She paused, uncomfortably eavesdropping. But what was she supposed to do, she wondered. Was it really her business? Tonight, there’s no screaming, nothing [...]

Elsa blew a cloud of steam away from the cracked Christmas mug and sat it on the cluttered table. Her slippers rasped on the cold linoleum as she shuffled across the kitchen to get a jug of milk out of the refrigerator. Through the frost patterns on the window she watched the snow blowing across [...]

“All day I’ve built a lifetime and now the sun seeks to undo it” —Ann Sexton, “The Fury of Sunsets,” The Death Notebooks On Euclid Avenue there’s a beige brick building with tiny windows. The beige is painted on, and the windows are filthy and smudged from the inside. Turning off the main road, a [...]

Many of the Muslims had lived in Siska all their lives, but now their former neighbors evicted them. “Go to Bosnia.“ One man hurled a stone. “Monkeys!” Others hurled bricks, boulders, or manure. While their homes burned behind them, the refugees took to the road. Spring had just arrived. The sun warmed this wind-swept town [...]

It was only slightly damp, warm, a kind of humor between her strong hands as she kneaded the golden clay. She knew she was procrastinating. So much of her time was caught up those days in a dreaming haze of thinking about creating her pots, rather than creating them. She wondered if she would just [...]

I'm at the playground, sitting on a swing. There's a temple next door and, from time to time, the suggestion of incense wafts over. The chains holding me squeak as I sway, rutting a groove in the dirt beneath me. With the heel of my sneaker I dig up a child's barrette. My throat clogs. [...]

He drank his wine slowly, trying not to look at her. Her words were flat, and there was wine in their sounds that pressed his eyes against the table. She had invited him to her study, to the armchair beside the heavy tomes by Shakespeare and Schiller. The books were arranged in alphabetical order, first [...]