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 […]
The highway to the campground cuts through the granite Laurentian Plateau like a desiccated wound. It’s been twenty five years since I’ve retraced this road and, though the comfort stops along the route have been expanded and streamlined, the forest and rock remain the same: Ancient, silent and unflinching. I was fourteen when we retreated […]
They will not say many things about Destiny, but they will say she sleeps in her dead father’s house because her mother asks her to. They will say she’s a good girl for observing customs, for taking the pain away from her mother, for going there. The women of Osamudia family always sleep in their […]
She’s heating water for the tea when everything starts again. The police officers stand by her house’s threshold; two of them, both looking serious and, at the same time, apologetic. They ask her if she’s seen the boy and offer a picture: the officer closer to the door, wearing a dark rain coat sprinkled with […]
The tippet you left dangling the clothes line disturbed more than the abandoned earthenware pots, which crumbled over time at the corner where you made them. The piece of fabric―grey, alive―gleamed in the morning light, swinging back and forth as if a finger agitated it. It was the second week since you died. The phone […]
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 […]
“When you see the kob antelope on the way to the river— Leave your arrow in its quiver, And let the dead depart in peace.”—A Yoruba song. My wife is tall and slender, and on her bones she wears a shiny brown skin. Her lotion is a brown oily substance that smells of nicotiana. On […]
Forwarded Good morning, my people! Please beware! This company, Finest Textures Ltd, is selling FAKE products that will kill you!! One of my neighbours’ friends used these company’s bags of rice to make dinner for themselves and the next week they were complaining of serious stomach pain, awful diarrhoea and bad headache. It took them […]
It is 11:32pm, and a mob gathers outside my house. It is a crowd made of mostly people from my village—the ones with clubs, sticks, and brandishing machetes with which they scrape the concrete floor of my compound, generating grating noises—and street touts that have come with jerry cans of petrol and disused tires to […]
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 […]
