BY CHARLES WAUGH

Two Vietnamese girls, maybe 7 and 10, on a well-lit Hoi An sidewalk after dark, wearing tee shirts, shorts, and flip-flops, stood frozen, their hands dangling uselessly, their mouths open. In the middle of the street, one of the ubiquitous mid-sized Vietnamese dogs, muscular and square headed, was rapping the death snap on a skinny orange cat. Blood on the pavement, dark red and clotted with dust, had been sprayed as if the cat’s plight began with a motorbike that didn’t stop. Two women, possibly the girls’ mothers, stepped into the street, giving the Vietnamese equivalent of “scat!” and waving their hands, forcing the dog to back off. The cat writhed left and right, wailing, its whole body shuddering, then suddenly sprang three or four feet into the air. Charged by the spastic motion, the dog darted in again, worrying the cat by its throat. Now the …MORE

BY REBECCA EPSTEIN

The house where I grow up is an expansive split-level with slippery wooden staircases and rooms that seem too large and too chilly. The house is built on what was once the inner slope of a ravine, now a steep street that winds back and forth and downwards in the same places that a stream once did, a long time ago.

I have both of my parents—although in ten years’ time they will live apart, separated across the country in New York and Arizona—and I have a younger sister, a soft, pale-skinned visionary named Emily. This is her religion, the desire to create things from nothing, to create beauty from what is insubstantial but becomes real under her myopic green gaze.

She paints pictures, she invents jokes, she starts questionable fashion trends among her peers, she makes her own peanut butter from scratch, she borrows our Mother’s long red nightgown …MORE