I don’t know what he expected to see. My disfigurement is not external
(fiction)
Tag: Fiction
ACM’s first official Forthcoming publication–work from a soon-to-be published book
“There isn’t any us, baby.”
(fiction)
A tabby, a calico, a Bengal, a Persian, even one of those hairless Egyptian numbers. Black cats, white cats, ginger cats, grey cats. They climbed all over each other, over the trees, in piles on the ground. Floor to ceiling, nothing but cats.
(fiction)
“Why don’t we come to an agreement then? I’ll buy the alcohol if you finally stop working.” Hassan said as he sipped his Scotch and watched her with his psychologist’s stare. She had the uneasy feeling she was a frog in his pot, and he was slowly turning up the heat.
(fiction)
Meanwhile, the puppy, who, according to the book she bought, is color blind, lies in the grass and unsentimentally, methodically, stops beetles in their tracks with his paw. No ethical standards, this one. He does what he wants.
(fiction)
In the parking lot, her fears festered. She was about to explode and had to do something, anything, to distract herself. Between working long shifts and taking care of Jason, she had no time for friends other than her co-workers, and she couldn’t face them.
(fiction)
Everything has its “sleeves,” I think, has its crap that just dangles there and overcomplicates things, even people, even me, especially me, or my mother for god’s sake, or my finances, or my body, good lord, and the same holds true for the city, I think.
(fiction)
The universe is expanding, a voice reported. Bits and particles of it are shooting out from some
ancient central point like sparks from a Roman candle, and some day, when all the expanding
glowing bits of matter in our universe have stretched themselves out tight like a rubber band, instead of it all coming roaring back to the center, as we’d thought, the universe may instead simply continue to expand. So any parting of ways could be permanent.
(fiction)
It was a space where his Swahili was adequate—he only needed to know numbers and how to say nashuka hapa or command shika when paying the conductor. He liked the feeling of anonymity yet knowing the system.
(fiction)
Earlier I heard the server compare ube’s flavor to marshmallows, which irritated me. I didn’t like how my homeland sweet was reduced to something as common as marshmallows. It is so much more.
(fiction)
But now, years later, she has to find Judge sahib regardless. You see, Hope has no expiry date. It’s like foreign occupation.
(fiction, satire)
On their first date, my friend’s fiancée talked about her job. She’s a mortician. She prepares cadavers for a funeral, cremation, or whatever is decided. She cleans the cadavers and replaces their blood with pink embalming fluid. If she has to apply makeup, she does. She thinks of herself as an artist. She makes clean portraits. She said that word a lot. Cadavers.
(fiction)
The translator was now bedeviled by even the simplest particles. Does “and” or “but” go better here? Periods and commas likewise became insurmountable hindrances, veritable lions in the road, guardians of the original meaning.
(fiction)
The Russian lived with his parents and grandparents on the other side of town in a tiny crumbling apartment near the library.
(fiction)
Most of the lies were about my mother, but I only learned about the lies years later at my mother’s deathbed
(fiction)
To know how to exploit the weaknesses in human nature in order to best serve Christ is one of the paradoxes of the inquisitor’s calling.
(fiction)
I watched the bag disappear around the corner. The wheels of the gurney creaked in the distance.
Are they always so handsome? I wanted to ask.
(fiction)
Her suffering fits right into the camera.
(fiction)
“I often wondered about the effect of living with no windows.”
(fiction)
So why had she made such a fuss in the first place? Plus weren’t they both growing old? Surely, a dribble here or there shouldn’t seem such a big deal. (fiction)
His guilt was such a constant companion that a serious argument could be made for the carpool lane, the last few days rushing him like oncoming cars.
(fiction)
It’s while waiting for the light at the corner of Twenty-eighth and Sixth Avenue that you first hear it: a soft hissing sound.
(fiction)
Malé is now the besieged capital of the submerged Maldives, built up precariously on the ruins of oil tanks and docking derricks, apartment blocks and concrete breakwaters.
(fiction)
Her keys might have opened the church, and she the one to serve sponge fingers like death.
(The Loop)
She spends her days tending the grapes, and she runs a little gift shop in the village . . . Now that she’s simplified her relationships with people, she seems even healthier, even more herself.
(fiction)
It was deemed very unfeminine to play the bridegroom . . . Girls would tease you and provoke you like a real bridegroom and laugh at your expense.
(fiction)
With boys comes a lot of stress. You worry about how you can buy him his own place, or you worry about who he’ll bring into your house.
(fiction)
A cacophony of voices inquiring, wanting to disentangle the mysteries of the tattoos like hieroglyphs, pictograms.
(fiction)
content warning: sexual assault
My mouth is full of blood, like a poppy growing in my mouth, it tastes like the pennies I used to throw in wishing wells.
(fiction)
Her mother continued to hand her things: that lost dollar, a Chinese cookie fortune, one missing pearl earring.
(fiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 