Here’s how it happened: They were all packed tight inside a tiny apartment. Lena, Milo, August and the others, all the girls in children’s shirts and all the guys in pants four sizes too big. They drank rum and Cokes first, sipping out of mugs, spilling brown liquid on the rug, laughing it up, “ha, ha.” Milo brought coke,…
by Alison Bullock When the silver-embossed envelope arrives in the mail, Eleanor’s husband Gerald is practically giddy. It’s from the chief of thoracic surgery over at the hospital where he works as a cardiologist. An invitation to a house-warming party. “This is it,” Gerald says, rising up on his toes. “It’s happening.” The invitation isn’t personal—everyone in the department…
You’re growing your first child inside; it’s a girl, and your father is visiting for Thanksgiving. He wears a chocolate-brown ascot with a white shirt under a multicolored Pucci jacket. You wonder when he began wearing ascots, and you curse under your breath because you’ve already purchased his Christmas gifts, which include an insanely-expensive silk tie you took…
By Kailash Srinivasan In Karol Bagh, New Delhi, the streets are narrow, crammed with low-rise houses, people and bicycles and the housewives prefer buffalo milk to cows’. You’re Bala, you’re twelve and your hands are soft, your school uniform is white and boring, and your handwriting is right-slanted and cursive. You live with your grandma, who perhaps hasn’t seen a…
By Adaora Raji When sand flies with the whirlwind and lands in my eyes, I do not close my eyes because I know that if I do, they may never open again. I am not afraid when a dust devil takes a fierce swipe at my face. I am not afraid of the rattlesnakes that hide in the sand or…
By Katie Dickson Peter’s mother, tanned and laughing in her lime green swimsuit, twisted on the spigot outside the back door. Margo Stiles was unyielding in her cheer, or so it seemed to Peter, and he tried to be happy too. His mother let the water flow from the hose until it ran cool and Peter took a long drink;…
By Zach Murphy The tulips grew apart from each other that spring. The ground cracked and crumbled in ways that I’d never seen before. I watched the foxes and the coyotes battle all summer on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, where the blood would leave permanent stains on the concrete. The reckless packs would flash their teeth, mark their territories, and steal…
“I think we can all agree, 2020 has been an absolute dumpster fire. But it has been one hell of a year for Stephen Graham Jones and his horror novel The Only Good Indians.”
by Ioannis Argiris Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh is set in an alternate reality where teenage girls are sent to a lottery building to receive a white or a blue ticket. If the ticket is white, the girl is destined to marry and have babies. If the ticket is blue, the girl has an IUD installed, and she is not…
by L.A. Hunt Author and activist Ava Homa sets out in her powerful debut novel Daughters of Smoke and Fire to describe for the reader what statelessness feels like. She does so with visceral prose and a narrative that never flinches from the harsh reality of living in a country that does not recognize one’s ethnicity, and in fact punishes…