Translation by the author
(Rukiga original follows the English, below)
You are coming from your friend’s. It is Sunday. The date is the 9th of August. You have spoken about the far and near, you have indeed nattered. Y’know …
Fiction
The Moms
Now my back makes these little popping noises when I pour a glass of juice. I fantasize about torture devices from the Spanish Inquisition. I want one that pulls from both ends. I might be hunching. I know I’m getting …
The Thesis
The first one came as he was attempting to finish up his graduate thesis on near light-speed travel and the future of space exploration. Bernard Rothman went out to his front porch and, thinking it looked to rain, held his …
Historical Fiction
Part One
Historically, there is wind, a hand for a weapon, floods and sacrifice, a woman carried off against her will. There are shared meals, a road leading away from home, troops and treaties, debts unpaid. Historically, this all remains …
Nebraska
—though perhaps I return so frequently to the contest in Baltimore to prove to myself that there is some precedent for what I am experiencing. To create a mental chain, which might be laid across the landscape.
What I would …
Cement Sky
There was Jeanie, stuck up against the reeds and the green brown summer slime all around her ankles. Fitz pressed a last cigarette to his cracked lips and they waded up to Virginia Bridge where the old hardtops passed idle …
Maqbool
The calls always came just around midnight. We were all asleep so the story was told only from my parents’ memory. A man in a deep, husky voice called several times throughout the night and my father had to get …
Procession
The last video he ever watched, because he died a few weeks later, was one he had absolutely no recollection of filming. It was an inclement day, a true Chicago snow. In the front yard, Amber was rolling in the …
Three Back-to-School Stories
1.
White parents, a mom and a stepdad from Bloomington, Minnesota, people who call themselves progressives but vacation every year in Paris, have a problem paying a whole hundred dollars for a list of school supplies generated without transparency. …
Domashniy
Madison had warned her.
Nonetheless Parker was now living with Alex, a recent Russian immigrant she’d met during the Q-and-A following an academic presentation of a Russian gangster movie. She was drawn to his old-world manners and his desire for …
