Fiction
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Saibin (the Visitation of Our Lady)
Our Lady’s journey began, as it did each year—even in our time—at the chapel of our village of Arossim, and would move from there to each house in the village. Our Lady was encased in a tiny wooden chamber, for…
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World in the Hole
When our time zones cooperate, I talk to Savion on the phone. I am, as he is, on the lookout for his mother, however dire our chances might be of encountering her. He has often shown me photos, since my…
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The Pastor’s Ex
She was no flapper. Although she could see flapping from here, what with Sara’s daughter’s leather miniskirt dangling fringe on her thigh. She gave the fringe a shake and absorbed the crowded bar, the packed dance floor, the DJ spinning…
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Transnational Dreaming in the Port of Hong Kong
Drawing from memory is acceptable, Hao said. I once went on a trip with my late wife. We went to Norway because she wanted to see whales and I regretted not taking any photos. But many years later, I drew…
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Garth Drunk
Because we had, during previous hang-outs in bars, gotten thoroughly obliterated drinking beer after beer, and because we had drunkenly parsed the emo-pop/punk divide and the boys had gotten into a good natured emo-pop/punk fight that soured, and because they’d…
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Helga Seeks the Unicorn
Helga met her boyfriend, Adam, in college at a party. They’ve been dating for seven years, which is long enough to accept as a necessary albeit boring part of life, like filing taxes or going to the dentist. At one…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bird Shoots Buck
As roommates, our cycles of sleep/wake/work were staggered, dictated by our graduate classes, or, during the summer, our crummy temp jobs. Chores lived on a whiteboard and were completed asynchronously. We figured the kid was, at a baseline, another responsibility…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Like Camels Raging
The job had a heroic narrative appeal. I could already hear myself sighing to my mother on the phone: the mouths I’d fed, backs I’d scrubbed. She’d ask what would happen if I caught it – if my lungs burst…
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One of the Good Ones
When I first met Matteo—that is, when we were both eight years old—I had the habit of falling madly in love with anyone who shared a desk with me. A boy would ask to borrow a sheet of notebook paper,…
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Rabbit & Ox
It was Keefe’s first run since the wildfires, a week after an orange glow of an apocalyptic sky had greeted them one morning. Day 182, though she had stopped marking the calendar in Sharpie at Day 122, too depressed to…
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The Femcel Catalog a.k.a. The Annals of Obsession
When you were younger, you learned how to hold your breath so you could crawl on the pool floor. Down there, the day sounded different, so you swam for as long as possible. The rising hum of water encircled you,…
