Fiction

We left earlier than usual. The sun was barely peeking over the mountains. I was tired, but I didn’t make the schedule; SeaWorld made it, and the orcas made SeaWorld’s schedule. A couple months before, a buddy had told me SeaWorld was looking for orca hunters. It sounded cooler than it turned out to be,…

He lies clenched on his hard cot. The acrid smell of smoke bites. It’s been like this for weeks, covering everything. Fires starting all spring kicked up by the high winds. He tosses the sheet off. He’s got the suntan of a worker—pale torso, brown arms and legs. As he ages he gets furrier, his…

Snow Yu was not a bad mother; she was an overwhelmed mother. How could she not be overwhelmed by the size of her love for her daughter? It was a fierce and awesome thing. Unprecedented, as far as her own life was concerned. It seemed impossible that her heart had expanded as it had without…

On the day she will receive the terrible news, no one offers Ludmila and Antosha seats on the rush-hour train. “Hold on to the pole with both hands,” she instructs her grandson, but he’s distracted, opening his sweaty palm again to check that the tooth hasn’t disappeared. The previous night, Ludmila tied the loose tooth…

­A good man can be hard to find—but here at RecomMEN, we’ve already found them for you! Our patented algorithm sources profiles from all the most popular dating apps and pairs them with 100 percent honest reviews from vetted community members who have actually met them in person. Tired of getting bait-and-switched? Tired of swiping…

Chuntao wanted to love her job, but the Visitors kept dying. The first was a bright-eyed, ambitious computer scientist, freshly inspired from watching rock-climbing “RockStars” on YouTube. He fell from Mount Siyeh at a height of three hundred feet. White male, Chuntao recorded in the official logbook, the letters ragged from her shaking hand. Age…

You proposed with a mood ring because you knew I didn’t like diamonds. The sun wasn’t up yet. I still had my mouthguard in. My hair was in a ponytail. My mom had just died from an overdose. We were staying at an adobe motel in northern New Mexico. Out the window, you could see…

Deborah Azmera drowned in the drought. Deborah Azmera’s brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, friends, and neighbors—a village of fifteen huts clustered along the receding border of the Rift Valley—drowned with her in the drought. The village used to call itself the mushrooming branch, for the handful of circular huts that lined the…

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic. The time I saw Mama raise a man from the dead, it was close to dusk. Mama and…