When my father measured women in percentages, I learned to chart myself like livestock—head, pelvis, torso. Yet the red horse leaned his warmth into me, the chickadees sang, and the body refused to stay math. Years later, back home, I discover what love weighs when you stop counting.
(fiction)
I am sorry to say this, but what if You made a mistake?
What if You took the wrong kid?
I heard You took two more kids today from Askar’s middle school.
Are the soldiers working for you?
(Palestinian Voices/ fiction)
He wonders if his life has been a lie. Was he ever really a selenophile? Were the yearly parades a waste of time? The protests. The fights for equality.
(fiction)
Sudden understanding has snapped me from her side like a branch from a tree in strong wind.
(fiction)
Back then, protecting the border was about preventing people from getting out; now it means not letting anyone in…
(fiction)
The synagogue of my youth wandered throughout the city, from the basement of the Methodist church on the Manayunk hills to the East Falls nursing home…
I held my magazines in my lap and looked longingly out the window, believing myself to be a melancholic character in the movie of my life.
(fiction)
Her aunts—a year apart and almost identical in appearance—ticked all the boxes of conventional postcolonial standards of Bangladeshi beauty. They had the “fair and lovely” smooth skin, the black voluminous hair that touched their waists, and eyes with lashes that could put a doe to shame.
(fiction)
“Humor is so essential to having a well-maintained psyche, because if we take ourselves too seriously, we’re probably going to be miserable,” Christine Sneed tells interviewer Kathryn O’Day.
He moved close enough to whiff my aftershave. Our eyes met before he grimaced.
(fiction)
She loved her Oxy, Hydrocodone, and Xanax, the pretty colors and shapes. She sometimes poured them all into her hand. Did she think about it? Of course, some days. It would be so easy—a glass of water, her favorite videos.
(fiction)
He’s standing around and a girl in a red coat makes him think of me. Or a French bulldog, that I would run to pat. Or a scent makes him turn back.
(fiction)
I was certain all was lost, that the curtain had been lifted to expose Double Take Creative for what it truly was: a two-bit operation run by a misty-eyed has-been and his oblivious minion.
(fiction)
The flight attendant checked the row number printed on the overhead compartments, consulted her paper, then looked directly at Mia. “You are a doctor?”
(fiction)
These characters feel like people you might know, people you meet on the dance floor at a Boystown club or a queer apartment party, people you’ve loved and lost.
(reviews)
She returned home when her village was liberated after six months of occupation. Her house greeted her with a collapsed wall.
(translations)
In the weeks and months after the operation, he’d wake from sleep, sounds tooting up from his throat not so much snores as noisy requests for air.
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“She didn’t think it would last, this quasi-détente or halfhearted madness or whatever it was.”
“I look up to those people who have nothing at all but their own body, which is used to the core: the rickshaw pullers, the sweepers, the mothers in rags…”
(fiction)
“One of the biggest things that I think about when I’m writing is trusting the reader,” Giada Scodellaro tells interviewer Erik Noonan.
“In this story, day zero is when I live, and you die.”
(fiction)
The Friday after Johnny was caught cutting up his Adderall, the AC unit in the teachers’ lounge broke.
(fiction)
Grigor, as everyone who met him agrees, had been dropped on his head as a baby. Or else nursed on straight vodka.
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“We washed our hands vigorously after reading all these things. We wiped down our doorknobs and our computer keyboards.”
(fiction)
I can finally legitimately stroll into a Victoria’s Secret looking for a bra-and-panty set for myself and not pretend to be doing Christmas or birthday shopping for my wife.
(fiction)
The shadows of the bamboo leaves shivered across Cassandra’s face. Even in the moonlight, she looked like she was planning something.
(fiction)
When the train lurches, I move like the world’s clumsiest pole dancer. Are third-trimester pole dancers a thing? No doubt someone’s into that.
(fiction)
His job was merely to photograph: to catalogue the state of the problem. Save the radiology for radiologists.
(fiction)
She didn’t go to a hospital—with the traffic in Bogotá, she’s sure she would have ended up giving birth in a taxi!
(fiction)
I don’t know what he expected to see. My disfigurement is not external
(fiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 