Hardly anything was out of the ordinary when Esther first arrived. Not that time was in any hurry to slow down out here. Things were in their fairly expected state for this time of year—even if, though the calendar read October, the burner had been high underneath the day since before she’d left Chattanooga. By…
While my mother dozed, I sat in a chair by her bed, thinking about Wamblán, a jungle river town near the Nicaraguan border with Honduras, and about Jacinto, who thought this mole in the middle of my left hand was a stigmata. Jacinto commanded the small FSLN base in Wamblán, a sort of special forces…
When I was six and my uncle was twenty-four, he did something that you can’t do anymore—he took me to a racetrack across the river called Cahokia Downs. That was where I saw horses for the first time—it was 1955, and we didn’t have a television yet, so I never watched Roy Rogers or My…
She caught a glimpse of her eyes on the screen and felt they held the fact that she’d finally found the very thing the internet had been invented for, like she had arrived, and this was it. But it wasn’t; it was just that her eyes were wide from losing focus and watery from wear….
Evenings I meet Angelo in the parking lot behind Whataburger to get high. This has become such a ritual that we don’t even talk about it anymore. We just meet up in the same spot right behind the dumpster, a small patch of creosote bushes that shield us from any onlookers. It used to be…
In fiction, our winner is Mengyin Lin, for her story “野火烧不尽/no prairie fire can destroy all the weeds.” Of the story, fiction judge Gish Jen says, “This gutsy and ambitious story nimbly ranges over five cities worldwide, chronicling the 2022 protests to China’s COVID-19 policies—a project fraught with not only political risks but artistic risks,…
Whenever Susan Bridge heard friends or family talk of inklings from the other side, or of being watched over by a lost loved one, she inwardly dismissed the idea even as she strove to be loving and attentive in the circumstance. She felt sorry, of course, but considered that in each case, bereavement was dictating…
Diana forgets the second half of her line as Emily Webb, distracted by the puffy sleeves of her costume, an otherwise unobjectionable 1930s “day dress” printed with tiny blue roses and belted at the waist. She swats at one bloated shoulder, wishing she could find the gravestone of the genius who came up with this…
Jamie was in trouble again. That’s what I first recalled of events leading up to the Breadshow. It was a Wednesday—one of Mrs. Riordan’s teaching days—so I had to go down to the elementary school on her behalf. While she was showing housewives how to beat eggs or pan fry a steak, I was dealing…
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