Dorothy is thin, predominantly. Like most rich people in a certain age bracket, she wears fussy, preppy neutrals, and her hair is expensively coloured, though threadbare. Her pink scalp edges out from the corners of her up-do. When she smiles the soft tissue of her face shifts into unnatural shapes; I am able to trace […]
Obiajulu suns his microphone for the funeral at Amesi. The instrument has grown weightier as if his words form invisible skin layers around it. Its original black colour now fluctuates, pocked in places to reveal a dermis of steel. He likes the windscreen best. It rubs his lips at ceremonies. The grating caress flips Obiajulu’s […]
It was an accident, seeing the pig. He’d been at the farm as part of the loan application process, assessing the site, having the farmer show him around, show him the proposed location for the new barn, although the barns they already had looked more like warehouses to Martin, like something you’d see on an […]
I: Flood There were dead flowers by the foot of my parents’ grave—the same kind as the living ones I held in my hand: jasmines. No one found their bodies after their disappearance while on a trip to the neighbouring village, so their grave took the form of a fokienia with their initials marked on […]
Sheila was upset by the sudden arrival of a new bush in her backyard one late afternoon, an unidentifiable perennial apparently so deeply green it appeared black in the waning light. She had purchased no such bush. It did not fit into her landscaping design. Had some practical joker planted it in the middle of […]
There came a day, six years into my marriage, when my husband was hit by a van. It skidded on black ice in a car park, and crushed him against a post. He did not suffer, they told me later, in the hospital. Sure, I said. He wasn’t really the type. My son Aaron and […]
I see Mama in de cemetery when dey put de white casket in de ground. She was crying so hard she was shaking like when grandma died and Tanty, Mama’s aunt, had to hug Mama up tight, tight, to keep Mama from falling down. At grandma’s funeral, Tanty say, “Doux doux Shalini, yuh have to […]
Mother brushes my hair, one hundred strokes with the silver comb, each night before I go to bed. She does it while I’m sitting at my vanity, counting off strokes one at a time in that bored, flat voice of hers. Sometimes I like to watch us in the mirror as she does it, a […]
Curled up in a corner of the couch, curtain nudged aside, Hank waits at the front window. It snowed last night, just enough to cover the ground, not quite enough to make everything look fresh and clean, and cold seeps through the glass. Hank can see the driveway, the whole front and side yard, and […]
At first, she thinks it’s yet another accident, here on this straight stretch of back road treacherous only for the speed it provokes in the young and the impatient. Another accident, right where that Nelson girl was killed last summer in fact, and Lynn lifts her foot from the accelerator, squints her eyes against the […]
