Category: Fiction

Iran, our home, is watered by the sacrificed blood of our martyrs, Sheena reads in Isfahan News on her iPhone’s cracked screen. The Peykan Uber spits her out in front of the historic Motamedi house. Sheena is in the business of...

My neighbor Mrs. Mawley was a believer in unseen things. Her house and mine were the only ones around for a windswept mile down the Enniscrone road. People said living as far out as we did made a person odd. But Mrs. Mawley had...

1986   Now that I’m here, I have no idea what to do!   I’m new to Arizona, new to this dead-end job answering phones. Everyone here hates me. I know because each morning we pick an empty cubicle to work in. I’m the...

Cody did not know Wade played the harp. It was not the sort of thing one soldier shared with another—not in boot camp, and not even during the long hot afternoons spent lying on cots beneath heavy-duty tents in the Iraqi...

It wasn’t at all like the movies. In movie graveyards, the prospect of the dead coming back loomed large. Moonlit headstones cracking open and so on. Shafiqa had expected to feel a sense of dread, perhaps even a sort of...

Our son Lucas had come home from nursery that day in a lot of pain. He wouldn’t stop crying. Elisabeth and I tried to figure out what was wrong, but small kids have great difficulty pointing to where it hurts.   All we knew...

First came the drama, meeting the man who would become the baby’s father. On her way back to the dorm room from seeing the movie Body Snatchers at the makeshift cinema in the theatre department of the University of Calabar. A...

Mazie’s graduation party is in the fellowship hall at our family’s church. My parents don’t want me there, but little sis was adamant. She said that if I wasn’t invited, she wouldn’t show. Mom and Dad would have all their...