I have always been afraid. In my childhood bedroom, streetlight against sycamore trees created frightening shadows on my walls: men, I imagined, breaking into our home, creeping soundlessly. Huddled under heavy blankets and bedspread, I waited for the creak of a loose floorboard, sounds of shattering glass, gunshots. These were not reasonable fears. We lived […]
Fiction
Mariko Nagai: Fugue
(When I was a child, I was always hungry. We grew up not knowing that some people were never hungry. When I was a child, my parents taught me that our bodies are not ours, but our masters’, that we are put on earth to bend as near to the ground as we can, bound […]
Kim Church: Victuals
Picture a man walking into a grocery store — Harris-Teeter, say. An old man in a corduroy coat, tufts of acrylic pile spilling out the sleeves. He stops between the automatic doors, feels around in his pockets, checks his wallet. No list. He glances around, frowning, as if debating whether to soldier on without it […]
Amanda Bales: Rotate and Return
Beth watched the tip of the rod quiver, the motion sharp against the gentle sway of pine trees and white shells of aspen jutting from the boulders and cliffs surrounding them. She looked at her shaking hands and took a steadying breath, stepped ankle deep into the river. Her casts were neat, but they were […]