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Fiction

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Hadewijch*
Belgium, 13th century I saw a queen, wearing a gold dress, and her dress was full of eyes, and all the eyes were transparent, like fiery flames and yet like crystals. The crown she wore on her head had as many crowns, one above the other, as there were eyes in her dress. She ...

Magdalena of the Cross
Spain, 1487–1560 A devout child, at the age of five she was praying in her church in Córdoba when she heard beautiful, ethereal music and a handsome young man with long black hair appeared before her. He was assumed to be Jesus himself, and word spread through the city. She ...

The Men
You could almost call them a squad—sometimes as many as seven, when they all pitched in. They were reliable for plumbing, basic carpentry, minor electrical fixes, and digging holes. They liked to dig holes. They liked it a lot. Twice she’d ordered a bunch of seedlings for ...

The Octopus Dilemma
December 04, 2017
The terms of the bet declared that for every ten seconds under sixty seconds it took the diver to wrestle the octopus out of the tank, Elias Coehorn Jr. would lose a hundred dollars, and for every ten seconds over sixty seconds, he’d win the same increment. The diver that ...

Belladonna
November 01, 2017
Through the closed windows enter gigantic crabs. We’re Stalin’s crabs, they say, we’re the Red Army of Stalin’s crabs, red royal crabs.

Intervention
My father called to tell me that my sister was going off the rails at college. According to him she was distracted by trivial fascinations, like communal living, and now owned a ferret. She was a sophomore at Oberlin and I hadn’t yet visited, so I used dad’s concern as an ...

Captain’s Table
For the past decade or so, I have been obsessed with news stories about cruise ships, in particular the idea of minor disasters at sea on a floating pleasure dome: norovirus outbreaks; engine room fires that result in drifting without power for five days off the coast of Mexico; ...

Brother
Let’s call him Brother. He walked into one of the cash-only coffee shops on Valencia Street, which was crowded with white folk, mostly writers or aspiring ones, I could tell from the thick, unbreathable air of seriousness, I mean self-importance (to which I contributed my own ...

The Festival of Sadness
December 05, 2016
It was a chilly afternoon but we had come out anyway, wearing hats and jackets to prepare our float for the Festival of Sadness, when one of us, and I think it was Nickerson, spoke up. “I know it’s a little late for this,” he said, “and I know that ...