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Fiction

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Side Boob and Insensibility
ED. NOTE—In keeping with the current (and, some might say, callous) publishing craze for updating Jane Austen’s work—Alexander McCall Smith was requested to “reimagine” Emma, for example, and had the nerve to comply—we offer you the following short account of a ...

Fountain
November’s first snow fell overnight. Outside the city, the mountains gleamed powdery in the morning sunlight, but the snow did not stick on the streets of Dushanbe. By the time Parviz Rajabi stepped down from the bus on Rudaki it had mostly melted. He was a news reporter. He ...

Gustus Dei
The convent sat on a waterless plain. Sister Theresa rested on a bench at the edge of the convent garden. She looked up at the clouds. She imagined them thickening, curdling, manifesting. Manna would drop slowly and drift to the ground like snowflakes. She and her sisters would ...

How Much Women Know
This story concerns a perfect girl, raised by her perfect mother and grandmother. Three ageless beauties, crème de la crème of Moscow’s Jewish intelligentsia. The grandmother resembled a charming infant. A former pianist, she wore lace gloves in the summer. The mother, a ...

Story of an Illness
To tell you the truth, I much prefer to be sick at home. At a hospital, no question, the light bulbs are stronger and things are more scientific in general. But at home, as they say, even straw tastes better. Judge for yourselves. My family brings me to the hospital with typhoid ...

For Yama Is the Lord of Death
A: Because I guess my overall numbers are not where they should be? That’s what Rhimst said. He had the numbers all printed out. Numbers for the month, the quarter, the year, and then the projections. The projections, I think, did not look good. At least that was the feeling I ...

Bizness
If you were born in a decent, settled country, you may work for decades as an accountant, you may eat a nutritious dinner every night, and then you may die peacefully in your fluffy little bed, thinking you have lived a life. Not so in my country. Its path is capricious and ...

Among Friends
I’m a direct person, always smirking and poking fun when we all get together at Marisha and Serge’s on Fridays. Everybody comes. If one of us misses a Friday, it’s because he or she couldn’t get away, or has been banished by the enraged Marisha or the entire gang. Andrey ...

Solitude
I’ve got money. But money means nothing. I have no visa. So I can’t leave the airport. I can’t take the express train to Vienna. So I drink Viennese coffee and eat Sachertorte. I’ll be trapped in Terminal C for a full seven hours. How many perfumes can you try out in the ...

A Beauty
Peter Fedorovich was gorgeous as a morning star. The moment office ladies glimpsed his shimmering locks at the door they fell on the floor in a deadly swoon. A bookkeeper once had to be hospitalized: she fainted still hugging her enormous electric typewriter, and it crushed two ...

The Agony of Leaves
April 10, 2014
I do not want to beat about this bush or that bush. I will say it straight: I am not a perverted fellow. It has never been my habit to move with prostitutes or other women of that type. Not even once have I made a lewd remark to a lady or suggested some dubious act to anyone ...

Up in Birdland
They could eat and not care about bad cholesterol, heart disease, or cancer. They could forget about those colonoscopies they’d been putting off and those impending cataract surgeries. They could smoke cigarettes and drink the hard stuff again. No more wearing a mouth guard at ...