More on: Fiction

He plunged into more and different living beings beneath the river’s surface, also uncaring. Almost-blind fishes swimming between reeds, above rusted cans and keys and teeth and bones.

Diego always called me mija, daughter, instead of Lisa. Once he called me by his ex-wife’s name, and ever since, he always called me mija. I thought he might have forgotten my name altogether, but he had his pride, and I took care not to embarrass him.

Wasim’s was the only part of the family cut off when the wall was erected, the rest residing on the other side near the Israeli settlement of Gilo. From their family balcony, Gilo can be seen—ten thousand red-roofed pillars by night, one colossal cloud by day.

Throughout the winter, Dr. Iske obsessively polished their furniture with oil. He had studied plant biology in college before going on to med school, and when he saw varnished wood, he saw the tree it had come from.

But it unfolded itself, and, like a long-held secret, its wings swelled wide enough to span her palm. Then she saw the color it had been keeping close: hind wings emblazoned with what shone like blue eyes, rimmed with gold and mounted on a concentric field of black.

My feelings toward Izzy changed by the hour. She was the most dominant person I’d ever known, shorter than me but somehow looking down on me constantly. On her left wrist was a tattoo of a cross. I asked if she was religious. She said no.

A man once told me that chaos must have a voice. A man once told me that language could heal everything. The chambers of my mind are full of wormholes. When it is smashed open, dark things crawl out of it.

One second he was riding on the river and the next he was in it, watching his canoe float away upside down, its silvery hull a bright line on the dark river.

The racetrack, famously built before we knew of such things, straddled a fault line at the joint of two very active plates. As a result, fissures spread through the walls of the old grandstand like capillaries. The world was tearing it apart naturally.