Activity

I put Eric’s hand in mine and study it, and he curls it around my fingers in a warm grip. I have known this man longer than I have known most people, I think. We have shared countless meals and car rides and our toothbrushes have hung side by side for almost a decade. He is weak, I think, but also …

I look at Eric and wonder what he’s thinking, but don’t ask. When we first started dating, I’d ask him all the time, and finally he told me to please stop. “I’m an open book,” he said. “What you see is what you get.” He was that way, too, when I first found out about the woman he’d been seeing a fe…

Give it a few more days, he told himself. Just a few more days and you will be fine. All that anxious refreshing, all that marking of time—what was the point? He had days to work with, which were made up of hours, made of minutes, made of seconds—he was young, he had time. This was the way the worl…

He looked uneasily at his father. “Dad,” he said, trying to recall his resolve from earlier that afternoon, “I wondered if I could maybe borrow some money.”

His father grunted. “What for?”

Zhu Feng didn’t meet his eyes. “It’s complicated,” he said. He thought of what his mother had said in th…

Zhu Feng didn’t know what to say. “So he stopped driving a taxi?”

“They wouldn’t license him,” she said matter-of-factly. “It took him years to get back on his feet again.”

“Anyway, it was a long time ago,” she said. Outside the television was playing a commercial for luxury men’s cologne.