Suki gave in to the buzz buzz, like a horde of hornets, echoing through the flat. It shook her bed frame and made her brain rattle about in her skull. Daylight through shuttered blinds, noisy street below; bin day. Which day was bin day? Could be any. Suki never knew what day it was, only…
Our fiction winner is Max Steiner, for his piece “Grace Zeroes Out.” This year’s fiction judge was R.O. Kwon. Of Steiner’s story, she writes: “Grace Zeroes Out” has stayed with me like a haunting, the narrator’s voice hard to forget. The story is mostly structured as though in a series of triptychs, with each panel revealing…
It’s like how dogs get before an earthquake: pacing, whining, howling at the door. That’s me. Whole hours before the sky falls, I catch a sidelong view of the disaster, looming like rain clouds out of the north. I’ll be on the phone with my dad when it comes, the question I’m about to ask…
He was in love with someone else, but he couldn’t have her, and so he chose me. He lived with me for seven years and I had asked for nothing. Not even marriage. When you love a holy man, you know that God is in his heart, and you take what you are given. He…
Me I’ve slept on a concrete floor keloided with lumps of cement and felt the cheapness and rush of the Chansolme builders—who poured down the foundation for our house in Port’Paix—as a mess of tiny hills digging their summits into my back, a blanket under me and a sleeping two-year-old Gigi puffing his baby dreams…
For Sergeant Kyle Buckley, A/2-23 Infantry The rangers in the station at Paradise put every permit applicant for the alpine zone through a murder board. With good reason: over the course of the previous season, one climber fell over two thousand feet down a sloping apron of jagged rocks. Another disappeared completely. People die on…
The sight of God in woman is the most perfect of all.—Ibn Arabi Violence is better than prayer. I know because I prayed for thirty years without consequence, then I beat up a beggar and knew God. I was going to pray even then, though that time I was neither leading the prayer nor giving…
When I returned from the front, I took the most direct route to the hotel room that Cora, the preacher’s daughter, had booked for us. No, that’s not one hundred percent true. The taxi stopped at the marble stairs leading up to the entrance of the hotel; the driver waited while I sorted through my…
Translated from the Hindi by Daisy Rockwell “At exactly two o’clock, take a look at your watches,” he announced. “Right when the clock strikes two, I’ll pass on.” A tone that boasted of his all-powerful lineage. He could lift people up, fell them, kill them, make them rot away. Even death: he could summon death…
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