American Short Fiction

When Lyle Arnolds is seven, his parents drive to pick up Sara, who is eight—they are going to the state fair in Des Moines, Iowa. It is summer, and the sun hurts. The month has been full of storms. Lyle doesn’t know this will be his last anchored memory of Sara Morales as a young child. A year later, she will move to Kansas. Other memories float: he and Sara chase shadows alo...

She’d been an ungainly, ostracized ten-year-old, but by her early thirties, Nine had ripened into a chiseled, radical artist. Then the pandemic hit and she reverted to the mean.

This was how she felt at forty-two in Oakland, California. Even her facial features seemed fatter and flatter, as though a truck convoy had passed over her while she lay on her back staring at ...

Tomorrow is our birthday. We spend the evening on my brother’s phone, reminding our parents about our earlier birthdays. They WeChat us from their apartment in Beijing, a light-filled structure of imitation marble, with a housemaid clattering about in their kitchen. Tell your mother about the first one, our father says. The first one after we moved to the States, we assume—oh...

Some lady had tried to bring a live chicken on the bus, which caused a bit of a stir. The snow pelted down and we felt badly for her. She was all alone, without husband or child to help. Already her dark silhouette was dotted white. If no one came to her aid, the snow threatened to disappear her entirely. In the folds of her coat, the chicken flapped madly, scattering snow, u...

I first met Lucy Harrison at an artist residency fifteen years ago, when I still fashioned myself a poet, and, suffering from a newly broken heart, spent most of my month there memorizing the saddest poems I could bring myself to find in the residency’s extensive collection of very sad poems. Ultimately, this had the effect of convincing me I would never be quite a great poet...