Fiction

Gdugdu jumped though the doorway cockwet his hair slickknotted toward his ears and slapped the sandals from our heads. That door flapping against the wall.

The Interpreter’s wife points to a tiny black spot on the white wall of the foyer and screams, “It’s a tick.”

Jonah began the workday standing all alone in a giant, winding colon. 

In Hell, women are hung from the strands of hair they bared in front of the strangers.

Albert Ducharme lost his fingers, they said. Pointer on his right hand, lost. The one just next to it, also lost, though there Albert still had a stub that wiggled when he waved.

The assassin was from neither here nor there, though he spoke all their languages. He operated mostly at night time, under cover of alcohol, smoke, lust, and other elements of intoxication. He was smooth with it—baiting his targets into empty, unassuming locales.

—The park, the woman’s voice says in Tina’s ear. —I got your name from someone at the park.

Two days later, as he sat before a computer screen to talk to her, he thought of how their plans ceased to frighten him when a pane of glass and thousands of miles separated them both. On the phone, or on Skype, all she asked from him were words. And words, as they spilled from his mouth, revealed more about him than he thought they would.

He was going to visit her in Wellington, he repeated aloud as they drove past houses with grilled windows and dumpsters with graffiti swirls on their lids. He took Maya’s small, slender hand as they both fixed their eyes on the empty streets of West Auckland, reassuring her, when she questioned him, that he meant every word he said.

Maya was fast asleep in her loft when Paolo rose from his airbed, his thin travel blanket falling away from his knees.