Fiction

Ever since he was a kid, Restituto Padilla showed a great aptitude for math—it was his one and only aptitude. The austere village school, with its green roof and plexiglass windows bearing the faces of national heroes, didn’t have much to offer Resti, they said at home. Bored one day in class, he started counting the ants that industriously crawled back and forth along the dirt floor. Chin planted on the old desk, he counted 18,657 distinct ants. Eventually, it became a habit, watching their trajectory as if under hypnosis. He learned to predict their movements. During these trances, his

They shaved their heads in Virginia. They bought knives from a man named Dog in Kentucky. A tornado twisted through Indiana. Two women offered unconditional love in Missouri. In Montana, they loaded a truck with square bales and in return slept in an old man’s guest room. A grandfather clock sat in the corner of the room, and so did the old man. He snored in a lime-green lawn chair with a pistol on his lap. In the morning, he made them eggs and kissed them goodbye. It was just the two of them. They were nineteen years old. Their

When I’m getting high on the back stoop, I’ll sink into a kind of cavern, where real life seems both out of reach and stifling, like I’m trapped beneath it. And then I’ll start to panic about how I’m just a heartbeat away from nothing. And I’ll remember that one time I stood at an intersection, just off the BQE, and watched a man on a Vespa slam into a minivan and how mid-air his neck folded in half and his body went limp.   That’s what I’m thinking about when I see the bird, in the corner of the yard

The CEO of Disney sat in his office thinking. He leaned back and touched his fingers together, putting them under his nose pensively, but then he frowned and hit the intercom button. “Get in here Margaret,” he said. The door opened and his assistant walked in. His office was as big as a gym so he had to wait for her to walk the full length of it to his desk, her heels clicking on the immaculate floor. “My fingers smell like shit, Margaret,” he said. “Do you want sanitizer, sir?” she asked. “No duh,” he said. He held his

I am in the gas station watching the CRT television. I hand the cashier a hundred. Terrible smokes. He cashes the bill, takes snail shells from the till. Hands them to me.  Gun starts the horses. Bonobo has taken the lead. An upset. Kidney Bean dances slowly behind. Smoke twists on itself, spiraling listlessly. First pack in years. The love of cigarettes is a barbarism. It is exercised at the expense of all others. The love of horses, too, is a barbarism. Grey snake grows. The cherry glows with each careful puff. I ash into a snail shell, flick it

I’m on my way to my friend’s daughter’s funeral. The day is bright and still expanding.  Above the interstate, it’s all skies and treetops and turkey vultures gliding. I take the Springridge Road exit, pass Applebee’s, Frog Head Grill, Office Max, and arrive at the stucco facade once known as the United Artist Cineplex, only now it’s called Pine Lake Worship Center. The massive parking lot is completely full, so I park on the frontage road at the end of a long line of silver and white SUVs.  I check my phone one more time before going in. On Facebook,

Noah’s never any good without coffee. Two blocks from the high school is a Dunkin’ Donuts, and he races there every day before school so he’s five minutes late to class. He chugs the large black coffee while jogging to campus. His tattered blue backpack with a Dave Matthews Band patch that he resolutely thinks is cool bounces on his bony shoulders. At this Western Massachusetts high school, the Dave Matthews fans are the palest of the pale, and the school is mostly populated with dishwater blonde, lanky, quiet Polish American kids. Noah’s black curls and caterpillar eyebrows don’t do

MARATHON  I read that this year’s New York City Marathon will be run single file, to kind of shake things up.  FOUND  I found a hat on the sidewalk and I think it might belong to you or someone with a similarly shaped head.  HULK HOGAN I partnered with Hulk Hogan for a while, until I realized he was using up all my gasoline, liquor, dynamite, and toilet paper. Eventually I started to realize that there is an upside to being alone in the world. No, wait, hear me out. There is.  THE BIBLE  Out of sight, out of mind,

For a dollar, paid to a taciturn man from the nearest town, hikers could pass the night in the abandoned Soviet summer camp. Mattresses were strewn across the base of a drained indoor swimming pool where the heat pump regurgitated the same frigid air, offering in its spittle only the added scent of sweet, spoiled beef. Although there were no windowpanes in the floor-to-ceiling gaps that hailed in bad weather, the roof, together with the dip of the pool, offered some facsimile of shelter.  To the credit of our mysterious property mogul, the back-wall of the room was adorned entirely

25th November As I spoon potato and spinach into Henry’s open mouth the 5Live DJ stops talking about death tourism and asks, ‘to what lengths have you gone to get back something  you’ve lost?’ It is a quarter to one in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Alex is at work, Henry and I are at home. I’ll try to get him to sleep after he’s finished eating. He is teething, and going through a sleep regression, and responding by rubbing his head so hard on his mattress at bedtimes that he gives himself friction burns, red-raw coins at the centre