A few hours before dinner, Dad walked into the restaurant and placed a bomb under the table. He armed it, set the timer and walked out. Our reservation was at six. We met in traffic. I was walking home and Dad was in his rental car, halted at one of the many red lights. The […]

When Jeff Alessandrelli handed me a copy of And Yet, which was reissued by Future Tense Books in April 2024, he noted the book was a work of speculative fiction. I recently described it to someone as Boy Bluets. When Nik Slackman, a digital editor at Fence, read an excerpt, he said: “I love this. […]

Salim, Obaid, Prakash, Usman, and I: five tough boys. We rolled our shirt sleeves up to the shoulders, hurled stones at pigeons, bulbuls, air-conditioner compressors. We were invincible, unpredictable. We saved our greatest mischief for the grocer. It went down this way: we would disperse into the grocery, open the ice cream fridge, then close […]

It was November 1999, 78 degrees, and dust clung to each drop of sweat that seeped from Gloria’s forehead as she forced a shovel into stubborn earth. She felt like Pete’s lackey, digging for the bomb shelter. The site reeked of ammonia–her husband had softened the caliche with buckets of his own piss before taking […]

Melody and Erica found the purple castle the night before, hidden in some cedar trees, while they were on acid. Melody’s ex-boyfriend Amos was in there, they said. Amos had been dead over a year. His blood still stained the beige carpet in Dario’s house, where we bought our drugs. We told each other that […]

And Paris Is Beautiful Too Katherine says we should tell the world the Gold Coast is beautiful, a real find, and I say Paris too, we should tell everyone we know, and she says we should also tell them about Rome and Florence, and I say München and Berlin, we should definitely tell everyone we […]