fiction

Every surface I’d touched seemed to flinch from me, like I’d done something wrong. Then the drip came back. One. Two. I sat on the kitchen floor and cried, and it wasn’t because the dripping came back, it was because…

I ask that my parrot remind me how to breathe. He complies. I take the cue from him as always. Thank you, he says, I say. Papa telling me when I was a child, inhale, inhale, inhale. The village doctor…

This place wasn’t for us, we didn’t deserve it, we didn’t belong. We had only come to play a temporary game of pretend. I missed our old furniture, how everything was made of wood with real density and nothing fit…

Someone once told him that that was what salt did: made things taste more like themselves. That was the world right now: more itself than it had been ever before.

Helen and I had been friends since the first year of our ex-patriatism—friends in the way that twenty-something women could be: seemingly out of the thin air in which we flew and flocked together like birds, the loudest caw-er organizing…

The first time I met you, your hand pantomimed that I should brush my hair off my forehead, sweep the heavy strands to the side. Nearly eight years old and playful, I responded Nice camera you got mister.

Blanquita is pregnant again. Mom is so sad. We miss you. The corn is coming in okay this year but the fish in the river keep dying. Last night at sunset, I could have sworn I saw you walking through…

Some prospectors’ ghosts leave their previous clothes real easy. My laundry shop was just a railway station on their way to the afterlife.

During the downtime between the rush hours, ba collected books—English ones. Some of the books he would find discarded and often outdated by some years, in trash bins outside of the language learning centers down the street. Our street, which…

Nafisa walks among the pilgrims, her steps slow because she is in no hurry. The Hotel Dar-es-Salam which has been her home for the past four months is only a ten minute walk from the Haram and the stroll down…

New teeth pierced my gums, razor-sharp and dripping with my own blood. Talons ruptured the tips of my fingers. Wings unfurled from my collarbones and I spread them wide, knocking over bowls and pans, casting shadows of leather and bone.…

The teacher leaves to go make copies, and more students start arriving. They already know each other, know where they will sit. You think you must be in someone’s spot, but nobody is upset. Everyone greets you with a smile.…