I The night before I leave Onitsha for Lagos, I tell Mama that I now live with a man. Full-time. As a married couple, as man-and-man. We sit on the faded red and black chequered cushion, in the spacious parlour that is home to chirping crickets at night, and geckoes and spiders by daytime. With […]
The Monday after Jackie died, they organized a memorial service down at St. Martin’s, and we got the whole morning off school. I didn’t want to go to the memorial but Mam said I had to, and she made me put one of Dad’s old suits on. We hadn’t really spoken much about what happened, […]
The summer Tabby is nineteen and tired of being the girl whose college instructors forget her name, she spots an ad for mascot tryouts in the community college newspaper and finds herself at the audition doing cartwheels and strutting like Yosemite Sam in front of a scowling cheerleading coach and her squad. She gets the job, […]
Part 1: The Siege of Khe Sanh Vietnam wasn’t much in my life that spring. Marching in the anti-war demonstrations, I wore a Vietcong hat made out of construction paper, but I wasn’t thinking about war. My thoughts were all on love, the pure hippie girl yearning for me and the dreams we wove in […]
My name is not Elisabeth. My eyes are not full of tears. My life has not just changed forever. My best friend is not dead. Mum screeches my full name like a fishwife, carrying over the howling winds of the bay, and the magic is broken. Every evening I sit looking over the sharp rocks […]
HARLAN LEANS OVER TO PLANT A KISS ON MY CHEEK. His fingers wriggle beneath mine so that our palms rest together, our fingers interlocking. It would be so easy to kiss him. Too easy. I lean back in my seat and pretend to be focused on the movie, letting the bright light of the fictional […]
CHAPTER ONE: The Last Man Watches Blazing Saddles It’s his favorite scene. The cowboys rise and fart, rise and fart, and he thinks of his wife farting in the night. He never laughed when she did. Most of the time he was asleep when she started and half asleep when she finished. He realizes now […]
His own saliva wakes him up. The icy patch on his face tips him out of the warmth he mustered from the newspapers pitched against the restaurant grate in the alleyway. Gabe checks the clockstrip he filched from a street vendor. 1/10/2015… 7:22 a.m… 18 degrees F… A shelter tonight. He hates being locked in, […]
I didn’t notice the note under my windshield until I’d already gotten into the car and put the key in the ignition. Immediately, a sequence of future events came into my mind. I would open the car door. I wouldn’t take the keys out of the ignition as I got out. I would automatically push […]
Quiet. You sit quiet as a mouse in the corner. Push a little doll around and hum la-la-la so they forget you’re there while they have the cocktail hour. That’s how you find out they’re killing Grandma. Not a single bite to eat or a swallow of water. Your mother is killing her mother. That’s […]