Expectations

We go outside and into the city, which is a messy conglomerate of heat and waste. We would breathe air if there were any, but instead there are varieties of emissions and so we breathe those instead.

There are times when you will do anything to protect a baby.

Two stories on leaving and returning to Ireland.

They do not walk around with their arms and legs locked stiffly. They can be saved.

An excerpt from Manuel de Lope’s first novel to be translated into English.

Life at an empty amusement park: An excerpt from the upcoming novel

Could she break herself down to the bare necessities like they did? Food, water, work? What were her bare necessities?

An unpublished excerpt, soon to be a film.

Having four ears could be a sign of the Apocalypse. Or just good for selling a t-shirt.

Tonight I’m alone. My cellmate (you’ll know his name some day) is in the infirmary.

He drank bourbon out of an unpacked glass, and talked about a photograph of him, me when I was a baby, and Muhammad Ali. “I have no idea where it is now,” he said.

It had been such a small thing, the thing that made them split up, the thing she later cited as the reason she’d left him.

The one public phone near the Atarazana slums that didn’t filch your coins. At least not all of them. That soon after hordes were pilgrimaging to it and lining up to dial their departed.

There was this six-foot-three very large man who lived with his cousin who had constant sore throats.

The detectives flashed their I.D.’s, just like they’d seen in the movies. They were simple boys from the countryside who needed a job. She them let in.

How beautiful our daughter is in her white Tethering dress, dancing with her younger cousins across the decorated length of our yard

They were still a good distance from Merzouga when the snake got a hold of him.

Ricardo never knew what to say to Javier Castillo. Can you blame him? I wouldn’t know what to say to a man who could disappear.

Sochienne called her a fat bourgeois, a dilettante dancing while Nigeria was failing, as though she could somehow solve the country’s problems by depriving herself of a manicure.

His mother was about to say something, but all she could murmur was zalzala. Earthquake.

The soft light of the flames made her face seem prettier than it really was. Younger. She was a fixture in his life, a neutral—at most, perhaps, a reflective surface.

Violet’s hair salon, Simpatico, was not far from the bus stop at Tafawa Balewa Square. It was on the way to Ikoyi, on a small road where artisans and craftsmen exhibited their works like miniature wooden villages, canoes, painted drums and rag dolls.

The Norwegians were coming to dinner.

This is the storm right before the calm, she is letting it all out now, because she knows it’s coming. She wants to go home, even if it is what she used to call hell sweet hell.

As Sunil stood in his backyard staring at the carcass of the small unidentifiable animal—a cross between a rat and a Chihuahua—he realized he was missing something important.

You take a vacation, you take a plane, and now this. You are running away from knowing this information. This is how things are these days.

We are from different backgrounds. We were born and grew up in different parts of the country: north and south and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and abroad: the core and the periphery.

Our Max lived his life straight as an arrow, fast as lightning, no ifs, no buts, at least until now.

Nothing has changed with him in the last three days. But I grew up and received additional time that cannot be measured in years.

But, truth is, I wasn’t looking too hot after the second scraping. It was only a cleanup job, the abortion just happened.

The Arab is so stunned, he doesn’t move. Just stands there with his certificate and his rusty key. Not breathing.

After years in moving, you can tell by looking at the stuff. You can tell what it’s worth, if it’s cheap or valuable. And this guy—his stuff is worth billions, you see it immediately. Everything is as expensive as it gets, the furniture, the pictures, and the kitchen.

He tries to kiss her but she moves her chin. He pauses, considers stopping, but tries once more.

They hired a Yiddish-speaking detective, wagged fingers at the short man clutching a squashed hat, and told him to listen carefully to each performance, find the obscenities, please.

The pain occurs to me, and then I put words to the pain, and before long I am in a cardboard box hurtling through time.

On the day of the battle, General Yu woke up with a severe stiff neck.

“You’re saying that the other Gandhi was created in the editing? Is that what you’re trying to say to me?”

Whatever you might say about the despicable nature of what I did, it was not as the press hints an act of desperation but one of hope.

I want to tell you about my friend Kandan. Full name Kandan A/L Palanivel. Twenty years old. Handsome bastard.

They have seen my house burn. They have shown themselves to be that which they hate, that which they want to chase away out of the village.

It was she who befriended Pieter. The things they did were not good things, not always. Once, they cut off a horse’s hoof for no reason at all, and left it on the steps of the church.

Since Pieter Emily had been seen, a rash of trouble had begun. The farmers on farms closest to the low road had found animals dead, their throats cut.

The dog had first appeared to Boone one night as he sat in what remained of his living room, staring at the tarp that hung in place of what used to be his living room wall.

Everything floats down to this place, the very end of Bayou St. John where Delia sits, her feet dangling just above the tepid water.

We meet to congratulate ourselves but we also meet to purge ourselves. We meet to share things we cannot share with you. Smart things but also customs. Like the metaphorical value of sleeping in a nightcap to keep the genius in.

The house she grew up in, with its walled-in courtyard, windowless rooms, on gray streets in Ghanat Abad, with some of the houses and shops boarded up, some damaged during the Iran-Iraq war and never repaired, and women walking around in dark shroud-like chadors, had seemed like jail.

The monkey shrieks and runs across the table, scattering purchase orders. They have just finished the “Fancy Furry Friends” trade show in Las Vegas where the monkey dutifully twirled a tiny baton in a beguiling azure tulle and sequined gown.

This ain’t a novel, Mister Podawalski. There ain’t no editor like there was for what Sam writ from his mountain. There is just the Lord checking his notes.

His excuses were always attributable to recent sightings of Bigfoot, the half-man, half-beast, which he argued demanded immediate documentation by a legitimate authority.

Aside from the phone calls, it occurred to me that Dan hadn’t spoken to anyone in over a week. The cottage could be isolating in that way and I was too raw for him to go.

I washed down the thick, sweet smelling medicine with water, hoping her cramping intestines would absorb it into her bloodstream fast enough to keep her alive until Soweto.

I find him sitting on a plastic lounge chair by the hotel pool. I give a little wave and he stands. We kiss on the cheek. He tells me I’m taller than he remembers.

The first thing you notice are his eyes.

Jiyoung did seem traumatized from the experience. She said she was scared to be by herself at night, so Jan let her stay in her apartment, and of course Jan stayed with her. I wasn’t so happy about my bed being empty, but I wanted to do the bigger thing, so I didn’t complain, not a peep.

We were not inventive people and so we called my friend Crazy Fucker. He took to the name like he took to us, with a fierce loyalty.

It was a bad idea to be on the road after dark.

Her advisor leaned toward her, his face close to hers, and looked her square in the eyes.

“Nan,” he said. “No one can ever really plan for things like this.”

He was mostly into curve balls. He handled the ball in odd ways, not holding the way you were supposed to, with your fingers in the right holes, lining up, getting centered. He bowled as if it were a dance, a slow one with a beat you made up from the inside.

I watch the color as she moves, carrying all of him in her form as if she knows. Stopping before a photograph, she meets my brother for the first time. Propped, he is supported by a slim frame of wood, reduced to a single moment in a four inch by six inch frame, laughing.

Five rounds passed, without pain or glory. Nothing happened in the ring to excite the sparse crowd.

The first to go was the coal delivery man and his daughter. His name was Zhou, sounding like the Duke of Zhou, a prominent early follower of Confucius. The choice of the coal delivery man was a popular one. The coal delivery man was known for shorting the residents on coal.

I’m a better person than a particular author of a particular story says I am and I won’t keep quiet about it any longer. One reason I can’t hold my peace is that the author is my husband.

She grabbed my hair at the nape, plunged me in, jammed mud past my teeth. She’s a Blackwater mercenary, so no messing around. She wasn’t here for Christmas but at last I found her on the bank of the river, I was back with my sister at last!

I want to offer one-sentence credos written by each of the contributors, and it will show you in shorthand what drives them, what they believe is possible in writing, and how they distill their practice (especially when they know that their sentences will be published without attribution, which is how I got them to cough up these mottos in the first place).

Church was bunk. Scarves were bunk. The cold was bunk. Robert Fancer’s grandfather, the man he was wheeling back from afternoon service in a crappy chair, was massively bunk.

We are all of us spectators—and this must be asserted in the face of the many naive traditions insisting that a portion of us are of a lesser sort, and can or should not truly bear witness to Agony and all that precedes it.

In the end Julia agreed to three days in Denmark.

Bob was inside. He wanted alfresco.

Gordon was the only person she knew, other than her parents, who paid to have a paper delivered to his door each morning. He followed gubernatorial campaigns in states he did not live in and had never lived in.

in superficial ways—the size of the chimney or placement of the porch—or in meeker assertions, a mailbox that looked like a reindeer, a soggy doll fastened to a swing. Evidence of thoughtless, pleasureless lives.

She was walking with the short man. Though only yesterday she had been with the tall man. Or she was walking behind the short man, down the street, wondering did she really want to do this and if not why would she be doing it?

My friends in the camp are known by the inscriptions written on their t-shirts. Acapulco wears a t-shirt with the inscription, Acapulco. Sexy’s t-shirt has the inscription Tell Me I’m Sexy. Paris’s t-shirt says See Paris And Die.

In Leroy’s account, a woman named Amanda, who wears a name tag that identifies her as a sales associate at the Museum of Olivia, explains that entering the town requires the payment of an admission fee because, “the Town of Olivia is the Museum of Olivia.”

Things float around like the room is a tide pool. I’m never sure what’s going to be where and what’s going to appear.

Grandmother was sprawled upon the couch in a heap of black crinoline; her shockingly white legs were raised in the air. Mr. Sparrow supported himself in a very precarious position and did not look the least bit comfortable but was busy grinding his privates into Grandmother’s, much like a mortar and pestle.

They met along the East River, beneath the Manhattan Bridge, on the esplanade.

Melissa didn’t think anything about Boone at all, but she smiled at him. She ducked her eyes, looking away the way men like a girl to do. In the years she’d been in this brothel, she’d learned a lot about what men want.

Acorns began to fall from the sky and slapped him with the ferocity of bullets in a gang shooting. I told him he could boast of hickies on his neck on his second date. I grew suddenly hot and wanted to masturbate in the woods hysterical naked.

I lived my first three years in Korea, in my grandfather’s house in Seoul, before we moved to Truk, Hawaii, Guam, then Maine.

She was limp and sweaty but I snuggled into the comfortable softness of her. They had cut her open, and she was whole. She looked very tired and sick; on her gown, blood bloomed like a slow flower.

Smoke lingered in the air but I knew it wasn’t the smoke I was reacting to. Hundreds of feet thundered by, some in sneakers and socks, others in heavy, lace-up boots. We were in a storm of bodies, arms, and legs pumping here and there, shouts and chants interspersed with cries of rage and screams of pain. I

He responded to my Craigslist posting fairly quickly. Age, location, and phone number—he was strictly business. I was hesitant about meeting him, but he kept saying, Nothing has to happen. It doesn’t have to if you don’t want it to. We’ll go somewhere well-lit. C’mon.

Mike is irresistible—a skinny guy with worried eyebrows. He likes to hustle poker, does not own a TV, and carries a handkerchief around for his allergies. His apartment is directly under Hellgate Bridge; he gets it cheap because a train shakes the building six times a day.

You didn’t have a real grandpa, Aleksandar, only a sad man. He mourned for his river and his earth. He would kneel down, scratch about in that earth of his until his fingernails broke and the blood came.

First they see the pale tendrils of steam rising up and then the gleaming cantilevered roof and then they are pulling up their wagons before the refinery, which is like a haphazardly assembled aluminum pagoda set into the high wall that marks the boundary of the kingdom Mnemosyne.

Mao loves to swim. Beside Li-Min’s bed, above her nightstand, there is evidence. A yellowing newspaper clipping displays Mao Tse-tung’s perfectly round head and shining eyes, bobbing brilliantly out of the Yangtze’s dark waves.

Can you imagine the static electricity produced by a turned-on giant gorilla?

Last year sucked for everybody, except maybe Jackie, who found true happiness with Carlene.

Before coming to the Amazon, she had heard stories about Jacques Gallant, whispers from female scientists at zoology conferences, always about a colleague-of-a-colleague who had been seduced by Jacques underneath a jungle canopy or in a mountain cave.

I reached across the table and scooped pasta out of his bowl, ate it with my hands.

He sighed. “You have tomato on your chin.”

When the heat comes I have to get out. I live on the top floor of a tenement walk-up, a flat filled to clutter with the detritus of a lifetime in New York City, my belongings packed so tight they seem to sweat and absorb all that’s breathable from the still air and deprive me of oxygen when I try to sleep. Such is the heat wave untempered by air conditioning. I haven’t slept in nights.

Thus began my fascination with Holden Caulfield. Not the Holden Caulfield, archetypal anti-hero of American arts and letters, not to mention inspiration for some of our better-read assassins. I’m talking about Holden Caulfield Sapperstein, an all-too-real young lady whose parents named her, for better or worse, after their favorite author’s infamous creation.

The sergeant dealt him a series of rapid-fire slashes across the face with his whip, and then dragged him to the edge of the flooded pit.

The young man was having a cigarette on the street corner, feeling just about ready to get on with his day, when a man with a Clark Gable moustache and a shaved head leaned out his second story window and called down, “Hey you.”

Everything as it always was, day after day, until the thunderous boom.

As the projector unexplainably kept on rolling even after the house lights went up and the medics made their way to the front, some, apparently to the filmmaker’s credit as an artist and perhaps his detriment as a person, continued to watch and even laugh at the hazy antics on the screen.

He should have been thankful that Xavi died when their friendship was still intact, still unconditionally generous, as strong as their youthful athletes’ muscles, as stubbornly perfect.

The mirror needs to be hung up at a height of 18 feet. The four-foot stepladder we borrowed from the Weisses comes up nine feet short, and climbing the low-hanging branches has not been as easy as I first imagined. The bark leaves a slippery residue on my palms and the needles tear away as easily as leper hair.

Those phrases, something has changed, just need to get away, personal vacation, were not really my words but TV words, movie words, pollen in the air.

“I can’t study here.” Karenne’s hand waved loosely over the room.

Augati saw the whole shabby truth of her life. The coffee table: a door, the handle still on poking up through the magazines that concealed the rest, rows upon rows of old magazines, many with missing covers, many marked and marred by grease, spilled coffee, forgotten bubble gum. Even the pillow she had picked up when she joined Karenne was bald, and it stank.

Of course, along with just about everything else in my life, everything work-related stopped, was canceled, postponed.

“Just lie there,” he would say. “Pretend your hands are tied to the bed frame. Pretend you can’t move them.”

Maybe I used to be innocent, before I was four, or five, before I stole Veronica’s silver dollars and lit fires. I sleep under God’s moon and God’s shooting stars and I swear if I see one tonight I will make a wish.

I miss her. She had a way of walking out of a dressing room, when she was trying on pants that would take your breath away.

“How can you stand to live out here in the middle of nowhere, Iris?” she asks, as if this wasn’t at one time her hometown too. She waits, but I am not going to play. She studies me. “Oh, I get it,” she says. “You guys think you’re safe.”

A guy in a suit, I don’t know him, walks by my cubicle holding one of the paper plates, his mouth full, chewing his last bite, folds the plate around his napkin and fork and cake crumbs, leans into my cubicle, reaches around a corner and stuffs the plate in my garbage can. No look, no excuse me, no nothing.

One morning, I woke to discover I had given birth overnight.

Jameson stayed silent for the rest of the ride, but secretly brooded over the fact that Rickter didn’t think he smiled enough. He smiled. That was something he did.

What we heard wasn’t wisdom. Friends made suggestions, dumb things. I didn’t hear them or listen. I snoozed on painkillers, lay on linen.

The boy who knew the answers was very short, almost as short as me, a short girl. He had to shave every day early though—he was that kind of short. I’m the other kind, the kind that had to shave late. I did everything late. I’m still waiting for a lot of things to happen to me.

And there we were—the three of us—me and Regan on either side, the ugly girl in the middle, bobbing up and down with the music, her hips buried in Regan’s crotch, her hands on my shoulders. I spread my arms out like an eagle.

Guest editor Sam Lipsyte on how he chose this month’s fiction and why “bad” writers can always become good ones.

Heartburn raced up her throat. Janet’s stomach bloated out in response. She felt her chest open and prepared to become a tunnel of God.

I am delighted to present the works of four writers whose originality, intelligence and emotional acuity I deeply admire.

They’d been chosen for their stoic, no-nonsense demeanors. They weren’t happy to be dead, and they’d all been taken quickly, violently, and much too young. None of them were much for conversation, but they found things to say to each other as they drove to and from assignments.

See how quickly a story complicates.

I am playing the shepherd’s game with the Shepherdess far underground, by the secret lake, beneath a cyclorama on which, suitable to the evening hour, the blue of afternoon is deepening to plum, while, one by one, stars appear according to a lighting scheme designed by the hotel’s Electrician. When in the world, he lit the stage for Max Reinhart and other directors of German Expressionism. “Life is an illusion,” I tell the Shepherdess, my hand rummaging in her blouse.

After a year, Phillip said they should try again. He told Muriel what she already knew—that such problems were all too common with first pregnancies. Pressing her hand, he repeated everything the doctors had told them.

She turned and lifted her windbreaker in back to show me the 14-inch, priceless George Washington bayonet, stolen out of the history lab and notched down the back of her jeans, the dagger-like tip wedged down the crack of her butt.

“Jesus,” I said, grinning, “You carried it like that?”

“We’re not firefighters,” Francis said.

The skinny man laughed. “Did you hear that guys? They say they’re not firefighters,” he called to the other five men who hadn’t gotten up to greet us but were still sitting down, smoking and conversing. “Slater, you a firefighter?”

The man who apparently went by Slater smiled. “Hell no.”

“He asked that his ashes be dumped in the Gowanus,” I told them all. I put the lid back on the urn very carefully.

The woman in the red dress adjusted her sateen shoulder strap. The car salesman began dusting off his knees, then stopped. Little bits of my father could very well have been clinging there.

Was dying to write something witty and engaging and perhaps even interesting to introduce these four stories.

You never expect a zombie to lean over and bite you, so you don’t really notice it before it’s too late and the zombie apocalypse has begun. If you knew, you could easily outrun the slow moving ones. You could just walk a little faster and you’d be fine. The way they get you is that you don’t know that they are coming.

Once you’ve been with a guy who has a big truck, there’s no going back. It’s depressing but true, it’s like falling off a cliff. May as well just slit your wrists, dig a hole, and write the obituary.

Her face was too white and the skin was thickened and shadowed and defined by a deep rich pink luster and her house is filled with moquette furnishings.

My daughter wears a jacket, like a book, but she is not a book, though she goes to the library. A book does not put other books under its jacket and walk away with them. My daughter tells me all the library books must be returned to the wood, and that is where she is taking them. She stacks them up into trunks and branches and tells them they are trees.

The essential thing is having a talent for having talent.

These sounds occupy many spaces, much like birds; there are the ones that rise upward and paint glorious arcs in the sky, and there are others that scale close to the ground or simply molt.

The important man had the kind of face that would look no different without the mustache.

“I thought it was going to be about this kid who was really good at karate, but he wasn’t. The kid wasn’t good at anything.”

“But you know the craziest thing, Steven?” he said. “I think the dragon was loose. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks because of the fog, but I swear there wasn’t a line attached to it. It swooped around the others, and then — whoosh! — it was gone.”

Not surprisingly, Abie did well. If he had a talent, it was that he could sell anything to anyone: porn to a priest, whiskey to a teetotaler.

Arturo had been the second to emerge, so perhaps it was he who was the intruder.

I sat upright in the boat of freedom.

“She couldn't swim. Or cramps. Maybe undertow. The undertow was wicked.”

I’m down beneath it when a wood bump wakes me.

Our love was probably less sexual than total, Californian in its appreciation of the other’s physical being, an annexation of identity.

Two doctors, married to each other. At first it was doctor and nurse skulking dark corridors in heat and finding empty gurneys, then doctor on doctor.

I tell myself I bought the painting as a souvenir, a memory in the French sense. But really it is my consolation for not finding out Amy’s name.

It wasn’t him they were so worried about. It was the half dozen grenades still wrapped to his wetsuit.

My wife and I were kick-ass archeologists. Found all kinds of old, important shit out in the jungle, dealing with dangerous natives, applying for grants.

“You must find me very queer then, Madame Clavdia. I’m sorry if I disconcert you,” Tintin said, his voice low, his eyes downcast.

Cowering behind an almost idiotic silence, I avoided looking into his eyes, gripped by the same fear that must have gripped Odysseus as he ran from the singular gaze of the Cyclops.

Her parents were naked, one on top of the other. Their eyes were closed, their faces contorted; they were breathing loudly and moaning. She watched them for a few moments, terrified; then she walked quietly back to her cot and covered her face with the pillow.

You could look from one end to the other, but for me there was only Castro’s hand, it held me in a hypnotic grip.

Are your recollections really recent or do they reflect a remote past? You feel as if time is not time on the clock, and an aura of unreality surrounds you.

To be more specific, we own a Wolof god of justice and an Ewe goddess of fertility,”

So I hear you’re going around saying you sold your soul to the devil . . .

Since it is very hot out at sea, sometimes someone comes down with a little fever.

We sleep in sleeping bags on the beach, so in order to get close to you I have to slip out of mine first, then slip you out of yours.

We went to a cafe I knew near the bookstore. I tried to please him by saying, they have excellent coffee here.