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Short Stories

Leena had to starve herself for three months, but eventually her figure is boyish as his. She exercises in secret, locking her fingers over the beam above the kitchen doorframe and hauling herself up until her arms burn and her stomach muscles shake. As Anuj wastes slowly into bone and mattress, she

The Hour My job is simple. I have to embroider the flag. Every day I come here from the village to earn our ethnic improvement grant. I sit here in the dust and sew the tiny threads which will make up, one day, the glory of the new flag. Paco, my husband, says it is like laying hairs over the

She pulled a bunch of ribbons from her jacket pocket, selected a red one, then squeezed it in the palm of her hand. ‘I wish,’ she said, and closed her eyes, ‘I wish that today will be the day that I find you.’ She took the ribbon to the large elm tree and tied it onto a low hanging bra

‘It is probably best if we start with your body. I’d like you to touch yourself – on the arm, the face – somewhere where your hand can make contact with your skin. Feel it. Soft. Malleable. Our bodies are fantastically adaptable - fantastically adaptable – to external conditions. Well now,

When Misha lost her fifth baby tooth, she understood that she was going to die one day. She couldn’t say why it was this tooth in particular that had caused this revelation, but there it was, plain as the bloody molar in her palm: the truth, plucked out into the open from a place where it had b

I can hear my brothers, my uncles, my great-uncles hammering away in the mines twenty floors beneath us. Candlelight toys with the dining room and for a second my world becomes dark. Grandpa begins, spewing out the same rhetoric he does every time the three of us are together. His hands are stain

One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, Three for a Girl and Four for a Boy, Five for Silver, Six for Gold, Seven for a Secret never to be told, Eight's a Wedding, Nine's a Birth, Ten, you must walk to the Ends of the Earth. Traditional counting-rhyme   One for Sorrow. The young girl sits at t

The mournful wail of the cop sirens is drawing ever closer, but I feel an explanation is necessary. From the first time I read the book, I was not satisfied with their account of the accident. I was inclined to believe a collusion had been perpetrated on the reader. A collusion in which Fitzgeral