I dusted the window panes and rolled up the curtains because Akwaugo was visiting. I first met her at the Lagos book festival. Someone in the crowd had stood up and asked a question on race in Africa, especially in black Africa. Did it exist? If we were all cleped ‘dark skinned’, was racism existent […]
I always said I got to get out of here, but that was just talk. Now I for sure mean it. Anyway, I’m almost sixteen, so I have to go. Ma and Pa say sixteen is the limit for boys staying in the house. My two older brothers took off when they hit sixteen, one […]
Time means less when you’re dead, and you’ve been dead a long while. Someone always brings you back, though. This go-around, it’s two little girls with a Ouija board, playing at your grave. Victoria Waite, Victoria Waite, kill my parents so I can stay up late! The rhyme has changed again, it seems. It doesn’t […]
All I knew about Ashby-by-the-Moor was that my father had insisted on being buried there. Or rather, his will had insisted. It amounted to the same: me trying to squeeze into a parking spot beside a band of village green as cold February rain slanted across the windscreen. Not that there were many people there, […]
It’s autumn again, or at least the aspens are dropping their leaves as if it is. You will soon be saying that we must get warm for winter. You will ask me, again, the question that I am still too afraid to answer. Beyond the copse of aspens, I still think of myself as the […]
Kelly and I met at Ithaca College. Then we both dropped out and rolled down the hill, living in a limbo where we weren’t quite townies but our friends who had stayed students were a bit suspicious of our strange schedules and sudden access to cash. This was back in the late 90s when you […]
Sin was a summer ghost, born of a death sudden as lightning. They slipped on bare ghost soles down the long corridors of an old inn deep in the forest, drifted and danced in the abandoned heft and dust-limned dim of the inn’s pillared halls. With ghost vision, Sin could see the many lanterns, persimmon […]
There is no one here, no one but me. Out of ninety apartments—ten in each of the nine floors—only mine has someone inside, but most have already been sold. It’s an investment, the estate agent told me when I was signing the contract. An investment for life. Yet I had no interest in becoming a […]
Randall left work early again, feeling ill. Nothing definitive, a general fatigue, a general malaise—that was the word, although he’d never used it before. If he’d stayed in his chair another minute it would have required an army to get him out. He didn’t know where he belonged, but he didn’t belong there. The bus […]
To Whom It May Concern: I’m writing to inform you that I have recently moved into ____ House. I apologize for being circumspect about the name. I should probably just spit it out to make all of this easier, but what with copyright laws being as they are, it feels safer if I leave that […]
