In middle school, I glimpse a trailer for a popular action adventure movie starring an A-list heart-throb and an unknown foreign actress with a melancholy down-turned mouth. She is not unusually beautiful, not compared to others, and not particularly gifted either. And yet, there is a three-second clip in the trailer which I enjoy: the […]
Fiction
Christina Yu: Window
I live in an apartment on the first floor. When passing on the outside, friends like to tap the bedroom window and wave hello to me. While working at my desk by the window, I like to receive calls, and I also like it when my roommates knock on the door—but I dislike seeing a […]
Christina Yu: Help Desk
At work, I call the Help Desk to ask them to help me fix something on my computer. I explain the problem, step by step. When I am almost done explaining, a new image appears on my screen, and I say, “never mind” into the phone. There is a pause. I am informed that I […]
Christina Yu: Flirtation
Every day on my cruise vacation, the cleaning service leaves my hand towel in the shape of a different animal. The first morning, an elephant. The next, a monkey. Then a duck. I am trying to understand why I find this so thrilling; the towel is only a towel after all, and the animal only […]
Brian Schwartz: Thrum
They were both pregnant but only Fran got morning sickness. At dawn an irrepressible curdy sourness welled up in her gut, forcing her out of bed, pulling her toward the bathroom where she would retch and puke and cough until, a minute later, Naomi would pad in gently behind her. Her equally pregnant partner, not […]
Scott Kaukonen: The Physics of a Bomb
Every time you close your eyes you see shrapnel and shards of broken glass and razor-sharp fragments of iron and it’s all flying toward you at a thousand miles an hour. You don’t think, you only react, and you launch your body into space in the direction where you believe your daughter stands, the last […]