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 …
Fiction
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 …
The Less Said
-1-
It was a simple pulley. Not weathered, maybe fixed-eye, with some plastic twine threaded through the sheave. It hung there from a bar, which had been bent in the middle by weight and poor planning. The bar was secured …
The Armed Letter Writers
* Winner of a 2018 Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for the 2018 Caine Prize for African Writing *
It all started with a letter, slapped smack in the middle of our street sign. It was Uncle Ermu who saw it, …
Ma’s Cactus
While I am tweezing the first of three cactus needles stung into my right shoulder, my teeth furiously biting into a small rolled-up towel I’ve put in my mouth, I feel more certain than ever that Ma’s expensively exotic plant …
Susu
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 it is unusual to converse with an age mate in Rukiga. …
The Birthmark
Their daughter is born healthy but a little underweight. Five pounds six ounces, the father proudly repeats in his emails and reports to relatives on the phone. On the second day, before they leave the hospital, the mother notices a …