Blak Power

“Go home and pray to be forgiven,” she cried. “If you don’t pray now, you know what waits for you.”

Europe, the thought of Europe swelled over the horizon, like a giant dirigible, strung with lights in a dream of suspended power, but filled, in the dream, with a gas about to burst into flame.

My uncle never did a bad thing to anybody, but one day while he was on his front porch eating an ice cream cone, two men came upon him, pushed him inside, tied his hands and feet, robbed his house, and shot him in the head

“Don’t worry, it will be okay, these things happen for a reason,” Ma Bille said. “As I always say: the worst thing to happen to you is for the best—”

Not much ever happened in Blaustein, but, even if it did, I would still remember the words she said, because it was the first time I’d heard them used, and their meaning, the parentheses they opened in my German existence every time someone used them, shocked me and made me feel like an intruder.

I thought about her son in Tehran and if he were still alive, what he would do to Sheila. Lying in bed, I replayed the scene from earlier that day and wished that I’d answered Sheila’s blows with punches of my own, wished that I’d defended Mrs. Azam.

I don’t want to have to get on any medicines, because as far as I’m concerned all shrinks are good for is getting you high.

Soon it was all they could do to keep these children from singeing the draperies or shattering the glass windowpanes with a single touch.

They arrived when the sea was swelling, threatening to sweep the old world back with it.

In Malibu, there lived a beautiful old woman without a nervous system.

In the face of its stare, I stared back, and the bear slavered in response, shook its thick fur as welcome or warning. . .

“These infidels cannot insult us like this. If you have the courage, come and face us out in the open. You cannot tie down a speechless animal and think you have beaten us…”

I don’t like the box they have put Papa in; I would have gotten him the fancy kind with polished wood and golden handles.

They stride through the woods and shout. They practice propping guns on their shoulders and breaking them in half so the empty shells tumble to the ground.

Eventually, I married a man more than twice my size. He terrified me. Making love felt like getting run over

According to Cornish, the pool, an infinity pool, would be able to recreate the event of Africa sinking into the sea.

During this time the weather changed and the voice on the radio brought uneasy news about barricades, policemen, and tear gas in the city.

Then again, now he has to go to Greenland. To look at a body.

Taken as a whole, no one who read the screenplay for Who We Are denied that it was clever in its composition, original in its pattern, and ruthlessly unsentimental in its conclusions. It was also “a bit portentous,” according to Sam’s father, Booth Dolan, the B-movie mainstay famous for his stentorian, blink-free performances. . .

He takes her hand, careful to keep his eyes away from her dominant breasts, her full pouty lips, and they begin in the living room.

Winona eyed Frank down the long black barrels of the shotgun. She complained again about that whore he’d visited every Wednesday for fourteen years, before he lost his manhood in the accident at the rebar factory.

There was something fascinating about images of unknown semi-naked women; I wondered if there were newspapers filled with images of semi-naked men.

Six feet tall and arms like bundled wire. He go strutting the length of the house.

. . .I looked down at Omar’s pants to tear off his belt and realized that we were shrouded in such darkness, I couldn’t see the buckle.

Notes on names Boy gets called at school: fudge packer, pansy, fairy, pillow biter, cock gobbler.

Jimmy Nolan has a thing for broads—loud, brassy women who sit with their legs open and drink beer straight from the bottle—women who always say exactly what they’re thinking and for better or worse, mean what they say.

This was Clyde’s third Ramadan, but his first alone.

First, it was his hands. Three days after he announced that he was going to leave me, I watched him drinking his coffee and noticed how his three middle fingers were slipped through the handle, gripping the body of the mug in a confident, almost loving way.

What was I going to do when I saw her? It was a question I had asked myself a thousand times. Slap her? Scream insults? Demand she give my husband back?

His first conscious memory, from the time he was three, was the feel of a rat snake slithering through his hands.

When did the Berlin Zoo stop displaying humans? 1931, I think, but I’m not sure.

If you must travel, travel by Amtrak. Trains are safe, buses are not. I mean safe from raids by the INS.

Seven months into her husband’s depression, Diane called the church secretary. She wanted the elders to come over and anoint Mitch with oil.

This story can’t get it’s tense together or it’s person, now. Has it even got its “its” right?

But the girl is still asleep. Perhaps, thinks the prince, he kissed her too lightly. He stoops down again and kisses her a second time, this time a touch more vigorously.

They were followed by a group in tropical wear, slipping and sliding, trying to prevent their ill-fitting thong sandals from flying off. A smaller group had chosen winter wear, rolling up the block like juiced up ticks, draped in coats and jackets.

I stare at the ground imagining I am one of the condemned, what it felt like to have my fingernails torn off. I clench my fists tight and brace myself for the pain, wishing I was off this wretched island, wishing I was home.

After my parents were divorced I fell in love with the ugliest girl in my white high school. This was what I believed—the love part, I mean; the ugly part was true.

In Qatar, the birds have built their own hidden city.

American Nurse became our possession, the Party headquarters in Beijing told us, for only a week before Deng decided what to do with her

His father is more than twice her age but her eyes are pinned to his lips as he speaks to her in his fur-lined baritone.

He’s mopping at his pelvis with a wadded-up tissue, and then he’s mopping her up as well. Already the backs of her thighs are caking up.

Still, I started for the parlor. I’d polished my shoes, put gel in my hair: habits my mother had always wanted me to form and I had always resisted. Walking down the street, I felt conspicuous, as though people were sniggering at my gleaming head and feet.

I imagine what Janneke and Karin would say if they saw us together: Oh, she’s lost it now.

He liked how her odd mouth conjured surprise like a jack in the box. She liked how he used his bathtub as a closet.

People who look on the bright side all the time are hypocrites at least some of the time. To say that shitty things are shitty is to speak honest truth about the world.

This bloody fucking century Uncle Miki said . . . began and ended in Yugoslavia.

Their bodies converse. They forget that very soon one of them will be burned alive on Place de Grève.

And then he would knock on the door and my mother would answer and he would say to her, “This is no ordinary child. She understands.”