My piano tutor, a walnut-faced shrew, rapped my knuckles with her small plastic baton to smack them back into the proper tempo, an adagio I’d mastered weeks before. One hour until the audition and damn if this woman didn’t break the skin of two of my fing

She had liked her new husband's sternness, and the way he ran his hands over her body, noticed every inch of it, made her feel not invisible.He traveled during the week, wore cufflinks, worked out in hotel gyms. On the weekends, they redecorated her house and tried to…

Luv walks around touching everything with her little hands. Uzma follows behind her, talking sweetly, saying: "This is going to be your new home for a while, darling."

When I awoke she was there again, the woman with the blue scarf. She was standing by the compartment door, gazing out at the passing countryside, the rolling hills of France. I had seen her before, at the market buying flowers, outside a cafe hailing a taxi,…

Excerpt

I build pedestals.It's hard workHeld together by sweat, love, and lofty thoughts - an unsound foundation.The tiniest bit of heartbreak,and it comes crashing down. Always, I blame the builder and not the vandal. The next one will be…

Her funeral was scheduled for the following Monday, and of course Claudia would attend. Trouble was, Monday was a workday for my parents. So when neither Mother nor Claudia could find somebody else on short notice to keep me, it was decided that I would a

When John wakes up, the first thing he does is run a bath, because his shower is broken, and while the bath is running he gets his breakfast ready.

He is sitting in his bedroom trying to decide what to wear. He has an appointment at five. If he wants to make it he has to either catch the bus, which comes in about fifteen minutes, or drive in. If he wants to drive in he needs to put petrol in his car,

Damn, I joke with myself, who was the fucking idiot that bought this cheap bottle of red wine?

Suicide was on his bucket list. Redeeming a lost soul was on hers. If not for the train drivers' strike they might have met.

I signed up for functional I did not ask for this mixed bag of broken glass I have enough to swallow

There’s a sudden Burst of color Like the dispersal of a ghost In a light wind And now candy wrappers are Scattered all over the heavens It looks like God got lit up By the sky As we flew too c

nothing. But it could be something. I don't know. We'd probably have to agree on at least one thing for it to turn around and face us. Then it would have to be named, set free. We could watch it fly away together. That's a portend to…

I walk through nameless streets, narrow and winding, past shops selling scarves, spices, skins.