This is the only reality: the atoms of each of us come together for a brief while here and now, the pump and flicker of our hearts dancing our bodies and our brains on the surface of our broken planet in this moment. Everything everywhere is already real, the beating of the squirrel’s heart and […]

I’d been packing on the day before going up to Oxford when the phone rang, and as nobody answered I nipped along the landing to the big bedroom. The lacquer-red extension was on what I had worked out was Esme’s side of the bed. Mum had made a new counterpane, oyster-white, which shimmered on top […]

The whale became stranded in the shallows of the island overnight, appearing from the water like a cat slinking under a door. No one noticed it: not the lighthouse with its halo of light on the water, or the night fishermen searching for whiting and sole, or the farmers moving cattle over the hill at […]

”There’s one question I want to ask you”, he began.She looked up.”Just one?””If the phone rang in your garage on Long Island one morning, or one day, and it was me and I was in New York, or was even closer, and I had come to see you, what would you do?” Eilis appeared puzzled, […]

She started bringing it up with Jack, began wondering out loud whether they should consider having a child. And when he hesitated, she asked whether their reluctance to have a family was possibly a symptom of their own difficult childhoods, suggesting that maybe they were afraid of duplicating exactly the conditions that drove each of […]

I don’t know if you have ever stood in the middle of a squash court – on the T – and listened to what is going on next door. What I’m thinking of is the sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard. It’s a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, […]

”–and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false […]

When Lia came to, Anne was perching next to a bed that was not her bed, in a room that was not her room. Her mother’s large planet-black eyes tapped shut every few seconds. She twitched curiously the way birds do when studying their very first hatching, their first glistening object of great and undivided […]

In the 1940s, Arthur Sackler had watched the introduction of Thorazine. It was a “major” tranquilizer that worked wonders on patients who were psychotic. But the way the Sackler family made its first great fortune was with Arthur’s involvement in marketing the “minor” tranquilizers Librium and Valium. Thorazine was perceived as a heavy-duty solution for […]

”I don’t know if I ever liked you,” I say, and bathroom acoustics being what they are, the declaration is magnified and that much more unkind, which makes me feel bad until I see that he is missing a shoe, and I feel it anew, this terrible disappointment in myself that I am happy to […]

Doctor Lynn peered into the abdominal cavity, which was pulpy with dark juice. She dictated: Liver swollen, signs of internal bleeding. Kidney inflamed and oozing. Colon ulcerated.  I followed her scalpel with my own, taking samples.  She murmured, We could always blame the stars. I beg your pardon, Doctor? That’s what influenza means: influenza delle stelle–the influence of […]

Hirai looked into Kazu’s eyes and gave a firm, definite nod. Kazu put the coffee in front of Hirai. She picked up the silver kettle from the tray with her right hand and looked at Hirai from underneath her lowered brow. This was the ceremony. The ceremony did not change, no matter who was sitting […]

In the second silence all heads turn toward Martin. He speaks of satellites in orbit that are able to see everything. The street where we live, the building we work in, the socks we are wearing. A rain of asteroids. The sky thick with them. Could happen anytime. Asteroids that become meteorites as they approach […]

Dawn. There’s no sunrise, no birdsong. Light seeps over the water, through the branches. The sky is lying on the loch, filling the trees, heavy in the spaces between the pine needles, settling between blades of grass and mottling the pebbles on the beach. Although there’s no distance between cloud and land, nowhere for rain […]

Letty and Marcia began a more leisurely tidying up. They did not speak of or break into gossip about the two men, who were accepted as part of the office furniture and not considered worthy of comment unless they did something surprisingly out of character. Outside, the pigeons on the roof were picking at each […]

Maren knows Mamma has nightmares too. But she doubts her mother wakes with salt on her tongue, the sea mottling her breath. Sometimes Maren wonders whether she brought this life upon them all with her wishing for time alone with Diinna and Mamma. For though Kiberg is close, and Alta not so far, no man […]

Since overhearing her and Deborah’s conversation on the night of the pizza, I had become hungrier for more clues about my mother, yet simultaneously more fearful of what I might discover. So far, Connie had proven prickly when questioned about her life, and only liked to talk about things when she could control the information […]

Olive fell asleep beside it at four in the morning. The next day, she stood before the painting as the sun cracked low along the sky beyond her window. She never knew she was capable of such work. She had made, for the first time, a picture of such movement and excess and fecundity that […]