There’s a man claiming to have seen a giant squid. He says it came up close to the edge of the bay, swimming in T-waves, and shaking a little bit. He says it probably would have eaten him alive, but that he got away just in time.

Sometime in an Oxford Greek class in 1895, a professor got off on a tangent about the vast repositories of long-lost ancient texts that might be lying preserved in the hot sands of Upper Egypt....The following year, Egyptian authorities converted what remained of the mineral-rich dirt to fertilizer.

1. Bad gumbo.

I.

On Allie’s fourteenth birthday, Christopher felt his hard-won sanity begin its retreat—right there at the kitchen table. It started as he watched Allie, his step-daughter, try to tell Cyndi, her mother, stories about their day at Christopher’s parents’ ranch: the picnic, the piñata, the horseback riding—their ...

“France is just a country. America is a concept.”
-Jean Baudrillard

1.

The heat veil descends the third week of July
and the market vendors feel its suffocation.
Next to the stall of spices, a woman holds a cleaver,
perched just an arm’s length from the spiked jackfruit shell.
She brings it down with the force
of one hacking through bones ...

My Viking stood at six-foot-eight, barrel-chested and ginger haired. His breath always tasted of dark rich beer and his moustache tickled my lips. Sometimes when I was doing the crossword or watching people through my window he would come up behind me, sling me up across his shoulders and carry ...

Mack’s Conversion

I can’t say I’m anything to be anyone to be saying a thing about it, but I’s heard it enough, I have, as much as any. But it was, gah, it was over yonder ways near Bristhlewaight or Skinnamarok or what’s-the-town. What’s that town, Geoff ...

I.

The first two times I read Franny and Zooey, I was going through, to borrow a phrase from Salinger, a “blue period.” I have come to identify these low times with the term “melancholy,” a gloomy Victorian adjective that has taken on the power of a noun in my vocabulary ...

“I saved a man’s life today.” She’s asleep. I climb into bed. My mouth hovers hot over her ear. “I saved a man’s life today.” That does it. She rolls over and has this medusa look. Quickly, I drop and pretend to be asleep before her eyes ...