I unfolded the fading black and red dhurrie on the floor and placed my sitar on it. My grandmother shuffled to the sofa, sat and picked up one foot and folded it under the other thigh. I brought her...
It was the year you turned fourteen and we found out Molly was allergic to olives. The year the snowmobile slid down the bank on its own accord, gliding across the frozen lake and falling through thin ice; the...
It’s Emilie who spots it first, a baby turtle, motionless at the end of the cul-de-sac. She almost misses it entirely, dusted as it is with the dry dirt of the pavement. The size of a quarter, the hatchling...
His grandma is angry. His grandma is angry because he’s hungry. She bluntly expresses her wish to cut him into two in a single stroke of a khurpa. Her hands scrabble on the semi-dark kitchen floor, around her feet...
I am paid every month to be a 72-year-old woman. Though the payment is only on paper, so is her mode of expression. She is, in British parlance, an “agony aunt.”
Dear Granny Gaijin,
My name is Nathan and I am...
Sitting on a basketball at half-court, Jim is telling the boys the fundamentals of the game. Mason and Jimmy listen intently. Well, as intently as can be expected from a five and seven-year-old. Everything is just so interesting on...
Everyone was home for the wake, even those who were tired from sitting with Papa Ned and waiting. He had made them wait so long. The floors in the house were pickled with sand and salt from people wearing...
Ernie and Sue said nothing as they drove the dark, curving road to the hospital. Sue stared out the window trying to ignore the baby’s cries, but finally she gave in, leaning her head down to rub the baby’s...
There’s this little guy on my porch I’ve never seen before. He’s a caricature of an Irish thug and he’s looking for Mikayla, my daughter, who he accuses of wronging his boss.
“Blackie Donovan doesn’t forget,” the guy says. He...
Heartbreaking and haunting, How Fires End is a powerful novel that explores devastating family secrets - who keeps them and why, how and when they will someday be revealed, and whether they can or will ever be forgiven. Part war story, part family history, it is a beautiful tale of multi-generational love, loss, grief, and hope.
The protagonist of the novel I will never write is kind of like me. Except more articulate. And cleverer. And a bit more handsome. And, if I’m real honest, his life-story’s a lot more interesting than mine. But he...
Now and then, when his face slumps into disappointment, I wonder if I did wrong by both of us, going with him to the prom and all that followed.