“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 […]
1 On the final day of his life, Lucien Halcomb’s cancer began to speak to him. “Lucien,” it said, with a voice like clotted blood and fevered nights, “I should like to leave you after all of this is over.” A month ago Halcomb had declined the various offers of palliative care available to him. […]
The river of night settles in my thighs waiting for your tongue. It knows your patterns, your timings, knows the hour is always seeking you. You cum at the witching hour—always, a booty call is my body to collect the spam of your illicit desire to be with someone. Your satisfaction is always the end […]
There were stories about Wicker Bridge Estate, always had been even before there was an estate. So many stories and for so long that it was hard to tell if what you were being told was new or old. Something that smacked of urban legend might well have its roots in ancient tales of demons […]
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 […]
You can get to the wendigo on the Blue Line; I usually catch it at Lake & Hiawatha. It’s a slow ride out past the weather-beaten grain mills with the faded murals, the trumpet vine over the fences by the new condos, the sea of white gravestones across from Terminal 2-Humphrey. The riot of green […]
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 […]
