#FictionandDrama

This is her break. Her good thing. She refers to it as her Success. The money is enough to quit Bill’s, leave that stupid town, accept an internship in London. For a year or so, at the parties she now attends, she regularly brings it up.…

— Wait, what did he call you? Sadiya said. Julio applied everything he’d learned of hermeneutics, philology, and translation theory to give Sadiya a serviceable definition of pinche güey — It’s like [Napoleon Dynamite voice] freakin’ idiot — Is it, Sadiya…

As things stand, the field of psychiatry offers us no precise definition for such cases of fleeting madness as those experienced by Mohammed Shatta, though literature has preserved an account of the phenomenon from the perspective of one of its more…

What news, if any, would be contained in Francesca’s voicemail? The fact was, I was worried about Fritz. There wasn’t any need to worry; he was almost completely fine getting into the car.…

The murdered Poet became for him the gash in the center of the sun, the model and the justification for being misunderstood. From the audience, during academic conferences, he hurled passionate and senseless accusations at the speakers, which were met…

Fateh and Fatimah lived on the westernmost edge of Simpelveld, at the end of a long row of apartment blocks, in the tallest building in the vicinity.…

That night I dreamed that my dad had died. The lectern at the service was too high and nobody could see me. I didn’t know what to say, so I gave a eulogy about someone I knew a little better who was still alive.…

Storm is a quick study. When he doesn’t know, he inserts Japanese, like he’ll get back to you with the translation. His eyes twinkle. He’s a trickster. You got to love that Storm.

Candy was different from the girls Robert knew. She didn’t care about vampires or makeup, but she knew about the Faces of Death VHS tapes you couldn’t find in the library or at Blockbuster.…

The truth is, I want to fucking kill him. Because, not that long ago, I was a semi-together individual with some irons of my own in the fire, living in an apartment that had finally achieved the elegantly shabby je ne sais quoi one might hope for in a…

We have no tradition, she said. What could we say to the dead except that we’re sorry for living? No, we confuse people too much already. How much more could they take? They hear “transsexual” and want us to prove it.…

I don’t care about anything else, I have them, when they wake up we can celebrate the prison break, the reunion, the successful hostage exchange, we can stop for breakfast, decide together what to do next.

This was how I would first understand Pavement’s music: dense bursts of esoterica punctuated here and there by mellow springs of warm pop hum, an Oasis of boredom in a desert of horror.…

He wouldn’t be thinking of my daughter, but then I also hadn’t been thinking of my daughter. Now I brought to mind her classroom, which I’d seen only once, during parents’ night.…

They could write a short story honoring the thwarted child by envisioning what its life might have become. The story had to be a minimum of ten pages double-spaced, with an honest attempt at showing rather than telling.…

Raya and Karim moved back into the family home. Her parents rented two gloomy rooms on the first floor of a house and shared a kitchen and a bathroom with the tenants upstairs. To Raya the rooms felt closed in and the whole house smelled sour.…

Just once in her life she shot a gun, when she was in the Venture Scouts, aged 16. It was at the Thiepval Barracks a few months before she took her GCSEs. The army must have been trying to recruit them or something. As if.…

Let me just finish disinfecting a table number marker and then off I go, I just have to put down what I’ve got in my hands to serve, I tell her that with my eyes, yes I’m coming, I’ve seen the whole thing, I saw you adding the sauces, the napkins, I know…

“I only love swimming,” I said. And it was true that I’d always felt awkward on land. Sometimes I wondered if that was why I was so unsuccessful at online dating: technology was incompatible with the water. “The monk thing does appeal.”