FICTION
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”
You’ve been dreading this day since the moment you found out you were pregnant—perhaps even before.
I’d never heard of anyone having a second baby right after the first one, but everything was so strange in those early days of motherhood that I just acted on instinct.
The day does not conclude with the gentle exhale of the earth, but with Mother Superior flipping the hourglass over, again.
At the end of the meeting, the villagers agreed to contribute shillings and pounds to sponsor Elochi to a university in America.
You’re joking, I say, interrupting the steady bumping of the doctor’s bushy white mustache.
I don’t know why I was still talking about the rapture. I certainly didn’t believe in it. Regardless, it remained a thief…
Before the headaches began, I thought myself sturdy: firm in my foundations, set square like a saltbox house.
Ever since your son brought you here, things have been different. He was crying when he dropped you off. You still don’t know why.
I pushed my nose to within an inch from the rug. I sniffed, and sniffed, and I smelled something…not quite right, but I couldn’t place it.
On the first day of our new life together, my husband realized that I was not interested in theoretical debate. He said it was okay by him and went out to get some pancake mix.
He used to hold my hand on Commonwealth. I wonder sometimes if he ever still thinks about my mouth.
I know you shouldn’t keep wild animals as pets, but I’ve had the same spider in my bathroom sink for over two weeks.
And then he feels that familiar sensation of drifting—when his body untethers from the material world and he soon dissolves into a fine, floating mist that evaporates into the atmosphere.
Darkness always follows.
None speak of how the streets collide in coarse seams like scars, the fresh cobbles unable to level with the ones shaken from their mortar by uncountable seasons.
To be encased, Clint had always thought, was foolishness. Why allow yourself to be open to such sorrow?
She turns her back for me to fasten the rows of metal hooks. Why isn’t our small, tender freedom enough?
Mama sped along the highway, unbothered by bits of gravel that flew up from the front tires and struck the windshield of the sedan.
When Laika the space dog comes back, bulleted to earth in a tiny white escape pod that dissolves upon opening, nobody can believe it.
Share some abandon.
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