Some told fortunes in teacups, but not Elaine. She saw futures in champagne, in the bubbles’ dancing. The pop of the effervescence whispered secrets to her intoxicated ears.
She first noticed this ability while toasting her sister’s married happiness. Although underage, Elaine tipped a glass of bubbly to cherry-stained lips and enjoyed her body’s heady response until there, in the golden glints of her flute, she saw the groom’s infidelity, saw the face of the other women. She discreetly threw up the wedding feast in the toilet, dismissed the vision, and sat out the rest of the evening’s dances.
When her sister sobbed into her lap a year later, Elaine stroked her hair and remembered. “I don’t know why he’s so different. He never has time for me any more,” her sister hiccuped.…
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Gerald looked up at the sky, wiping his hands on his overalls. The rain is coming again. It will be arduous, and the crops will probably fail. However, after that comes the season of plenty. The crops will grow.
They’d better.
Marcus, his son, walked along carrying two milk buckets. They exchanged glances.
“Come here,” Gerald said, taking off his tattered Stetson and dropping it on the porch beside him. “We have to talk”
“I’ve got to get the milk over to the…”
“Don’t worry about that,” Gerald took a seat in one of the cork chairs on the porch. “Sit.”
Marcus put the milk down and sat down in the chair beside his father. For a few moments, they peered at the fading sun in the sky.…
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I used to be diligent in my defense against the growing forces of dog hair, using a lint roller or my hands to fend off their growing numbers. My decision to wear black clothing became a signal of my inability to adapt. I loved my dog more than anything in the world and I didn’t care if people knew I had a dog by glancing at my clothes. The evidence was there for the world to see, and eventually I gave up and waved the white flag of defeat.
What started as a minor inconvenience, had soon turned into my worst nightmare. The dog hair, unsatisfied with me surrendering my clothing, became greedy and continued its relentless conquest. My frustration accumulated as I began waking up with dog hair in my mouth.…
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At 11 p.m., Ling called her mother’s WeChat video. It took a while before her mother answered it. Ling said, “Mom, it’s late. Stop watching TV series. You should take a good rest. You have to get up at seven o’clock tomorrow to work.”
Ling’s mother said, “I’m not sleepy. The more I watch, the more refreshed I am.” After that, she hung up the video.
Ling could imagine her mother curling up on the sofa, binge-watching the romantic drama. Her mother would be so immersed in the love-hate relationship between the hero and heroine while her father was snoring on the bed in the bedroom.
Ling’s mother became obsessed with romantic dramas two years ago. She told Ling, “If I had known the TV series was so good, I wouldn’t have married your father.”…
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You are a video camera on a man’s shoulder. You spend most of your days in the equipment room at Channel Six News, but tonight you are hoisted shoulder-high before the stage at a local nightclub. It is February, 2003. You are capturing images, stills of color and shape at a rate of twenty-four frames per second. Almost fifteen hundred photographs per minute, creating a retrievable reality, as the air is still and goes in and out of lungs at that atom-thin edge between now and the future.
What you see now, unfeeling, is a hair-metal band that sold millions of records in the late 1980s. These are older men now; it is early 2003. You see beers and pale arms lifted straight up, and the people attached to those beers and pale arms are jumpy, excited, and happy.…
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The journey took more than four hours. Crammed to the gunnels with more than a hundred people, the old fishing boat was slow. As it fought the currents, the engine could do little more than growl. Any wave caused it to shudder, as if it were afraid of the water. Wedged between two men and a woman with a baby on her lap, I couldn’t move an inch. I grabbed hold of my amulet and closed my eyes. Some people had thrown up inside the boat; others had urinated and defecated wherever they could. If we hadn’t been up on deck, lashed by the wind, the smell would have become unbearable. But nobody said a word. Whether it was because we were dreaming of a new life in Europe, or because we were petrified of drowning, we were silent.…
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2 a.m. is the hour of malcontent. The restless lie afraid of tomorrow, and the wide-awake try to bury the past.
Misha shifted her legs so she could wipe off their slick sweat on the bedsheet. The gentle whirr of the ceiling fan did little to assuage the relentless heat of Indian summer. She kept her eyes shut tight in a fruitless attempt to lure sleep, but her mind threw blank sheet after blank sheet for her thoughts to scribble on.
A grinding noise punctured her ears: the crunch of hard, white enamel scraping against itself from inside her husband’s mouth. Karim was facing away from her, and she knew he was dreaming. She poked her finger between his shoulder blades. A grunt, a sharp intake of breath, and a mumbled, “Sorry.…
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