Hope is the thing with feet. Brother Jude and I scuffed ours along a cracked sidewalk. Basement holes yawned left and right, swallows flew south, and I leaned forward, hitching up my bedroll and hustling to keep up with Jude, a head taller and half-again wider, a born heavy-lifter […]
Violet woke up with the bruises. Outside, the sky had turned dark. A hushed grey filled with pinpricks of blue fire, and the world tipped forward, a great dome that would suffocate her if she breathed too deep. This was how it had always been […]
Before we set sail for Beyrouth, I had resolved to knit ten pairs of socks, one for each day of the journey.
On the day we dropped anchor at that famous port, I distributed nineteen new pairs of socks among the crew of the Tridente. Our progress had been delayed by angry, low clouds, a howling wind, and a discreet argument among the captain’s trusted sailors […]
Never have I travelled so far to review an exhibition. For this, however, I would have travelled further.
Readers of my column in the Times of India will be aware that sculpture is my passion. It was the first art form, and it is the last, in the white figures of the skeletons we leave after death. […]
“There’s been a disassembling in the Shoals,” Marshal Luin announced as she navigated the narrow stone stairs behind Rusk’s house.
Reaching the garden at the bottom, where Rusk had spent his early morning reading, she added, “An unattached farrago named Sirin.” […]
A yellow beak, the shape of a crescent moon, pricks through your abdomen, and you know it’s time. Everyone else knows it’s time too. The townspeople track your pregnancies, right down to the hour, so when you phone the paramedics, the woman who answers doesn't bother to ask the nature of your emergency. […]
