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My mother was born in Leningrad, after the Great Patriotic War. When she was seven years old, she became addicted to shooting practice. The range was housed in the basement of the five-story residential building where she lived. The basement, a remodeled air-raid shelter, was a long, low-ceilinged room, filled with cigarette smoke and the smell of stale beer. My mother frequented the place on her way home from first grade.
—From Like Water and Other Stories, a collection of short stories by Olga Zilberbourg (WTAW Press, 2019). This section is from "My Mother at the Shooting Range," pp. 36-39, and was first published in J Journal: New Writing on Justice (3.1, Spring 2010).
In Shanghai, they met up with his wife's cousin, who lived alone and worked in a pie shop. Here the prepaid tour ended and they said goodbye to Karl and the others. His wife had booked a room at the Langham. There were no light switches, just a control pad by the bed. The toilet lid lifted each time he passed. In Shanghai, they ate more. Hot pot, grilled fish, barbecue, fried noodles, soup noodles, soup dumplings, regular dumplings, an upscale KFC.
—From "The Trip," a short story by Weike Wang, The New Yorker (November 18, 2019), pp. 62-67.
Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.
She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.
She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.
Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms)
Next Door
Sex (in its many forms)
Slugs
Friends were: God
Our dog
Auntie Madge
The Novels of Charlotte Brontë
Slug pellets
and me, at first. I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World. She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn’t that she couldn't do it, more that she didn't want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me.
—From Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a novel by Jeanette Winterson (Grove Press, 1985).
All I said was that she must like beige a lot. I was trying to put my finger on why I disliked her so much. Audrey. My brother’s new girlfriend. I thought maybe it was the different shades of beige she’d been wearing all week.
“You must really like beige,” I said, and she said: “What do you mean?”
“Your pants,” I said, “your shirts—all beige. Or . . . oatmeal, maybe.” “Oatmeal” sounded less aggressive. I’d been told I was a little mean at times, in my choice of words.
“My pants are green,” Audrey said.
“Jeanne is right,” my brother said, and it was the first time he’d agreed with me all year. “Your pants aren’t green, babe.”
Just like that, Audrey found out that she was color-blind.
—From "Only Orange," a short story by Camille Bordas, The New Yorker (December 23, 2019), pp. 76-83.
The summer Val turned twenty-five, her sort-of stepbrother, Zeke, came to live with her in New York. He was nineteen, and when he appeared at her front door, two pairs of shoes dangling from her backpack, drinking greedily from a can of Coke, she was meeting him for the first time. Decades ago, Zeke's mother had been married to Val's father.
—From Objects of Desire, a collection of stories by Clare Sestanovich (Knopf, 2021). This section is from "Wants and Needs," pp. 139-156.