Elisabeth
It was early Sunday morning. I had taken a deckchair from the veranda and carried it down to the corner of the garden, next to the flagpole, and was sitting there reading The Anarchist. My brother and his wife weren’t up yet. I glanced up at the house now and again, at their bedroom window,...
Business
You’re standing outside the bar on 104th Street and Broadway, the rain beating down like it means you harm at first, then dissipates so all it does is leave the street slick and smooth as a sheet of marble. You inhale that smell of wet pavement you’ve known forever, and the city shines back at...
Catching the tap-tap to Cayes de Jacmel
Lucien pulls at bits of broken wood near his sore leg, hoping to hear the hard rattle of plastic. He found two bags of crisps here before, and some sweets. But that was a long time ago now. Two, three days? He’s been down here now, he doesn’t know how long. How do you tell...
Ex cathedra
“Godfather, you’ll go blind from that, sir.” “What?” “You’re going to go blind. Reading is so sad. No sir, give me that book.” Caetaninha took the book out of his hands. Her godfather paced around and then went into his study, where there was no lack of books. He closed the door behind him and...
Origami
Another paper cut. Rebecca’s hands were a mess: swollen with tiny cuts, peppered with dry patches. She’d have to make sure they were all healed before Sean got home, or he would know what she’d been doing. She checked the clock. Almost six: she’d better get some dinner on. She pottered around the flat, checking...
The will
Because the visit was urgent, I didn’t even finish my lunch hour. Before the clock struck two I was at the door of Otto Mayer’s old, twenty-something-storey building on Rua Tupis. The notary had told me with no uncertainty that we were doing him a favour and not to worry about protocol. “Forget the witnesses,...
The old world
No one wants to listen to a man lament his solitary nights – myself included. Which is why, on an early fall morning four months after Gail left, when a woman breezed into my shop with a pinstriped skirt in her arms and said, “On what day this can be ready?” I didn’t write a...
Circus eroticus
It was afternoon. The hustle and bustle downtown masked the nervous coming and going of men in front of the old two-story house on Rua Primeiro de Março. On the façade of dusty drawn blinds, a plaque read ‘SECOND-HAND BOOKS – 2nd floor’. Beneath, in small letters, the line ‘Ring the bell’. The client obeyed...
The meaning
My God, I’m bored! Maurice Levine dawdled along Hempstead Gardens towards home, a journey he had been making every day for over fifty-five years, ever since his marriage to Gina Jacobs. The appearance of number 16, identical to every other house in Hempstead Gardens, was the one sight he could rely upon to arouse in...
Springtime, Anchorage
When I was twelve, I killed a boy. We were on the fifth floor and messing around on the benches by the window. It could have been me that fell, just one of those things. It was ruled an accident, no charges were brought, but the Fates had a punishment for me. I grew up...
Joyce Carol Oates: ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’
Anyone who doubts a short story’s capacity to pack a powerful punch hasn’t yet read the much anthologised and analysed short story by Joyce Carol Oates ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’. Set in the mid-1960s, it is a tale that can be read as a crime story, an allegory, a snapshot of...
Katherine Mansfield: ‘Bliss’
“What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks...
