Abdulaziz sat on the floor and listened to the screams and the music through his window. Outside, everything was wild. He wasn’t old enough to remember the last election, but he couldn’t imagine it being as loud as this one. He was scared. All that noise, those colors… It was too much. When his bedroom [...]
I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The equator runs across these highlands . . . and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. --Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa. It is difficult for me to relate to Isak Dinesen’s experience. New York Jewish women do [...]
Fatigue only pushed them onward. Concepts of time diffused in their wake. Hunger atrophied-- a hollow thought redressed by expectation. On and on and on they soared through the comforting cold of liquid space. Above them the great void; below the dense, rocky base of the world; ahead only blackness. Gliding up, then down, the [...]
I lick the blob of blood on the tip of my thumb and resist crying as we paddle our old canoe toward the effulgent rays emanating from the lake. “We should probably uproot that tomorrow morning.” Papa tips his head toward the slim plank jutting out from the water near the rickety dock behind. My [...]
“It is time to move on,” the elders had proclaimed when the last of the grass and bushes near the village were gone and the sand flowed over land that had once been fertile. It was the same story that had been replayed over millennia of time. As the land grew parched, the people would [...]
The tear was gruesome. It came from the coat hook that had caught Meena on the back of her shoulder, after she fell from the ladder. She had been attempting to change a light bulb in the kitchen but now she stood in the bathroom, twisting her body toward the mirror, staring. The tear was [...]
<Load Text File Evidence/OSAS/Encrypted_H-Mail_to_active_ENIX_members> Transmitter: [UNKNOWN – SOURCE TRACE FAILURE] Reception Date: Hour 16.45, Day 243, Year 2505. Subject: “Prepare Yourselves” Receivers: [UNKNOWN – SOURCE TRACE FAILURE] When the hunger and the bombs came, we forgot our heritage of independence and reasoning. We descended into an abyss of sheep-like senselessness. We gave them our obedience, [...]
It’s not the cold what kills you. Not the naarg-wolves neither, Maw says, though they’re plenty scary. No, it’s the Dreams what’ll get you in the end. Dreams what wake in winter and sleep in summer. If only summer weren’t so short. Like the song of a chitkil it is, a burst of glory that [...]
The Lord of Darkness assembles himself from the shadows, takes form in a corner of the room, and then scampers to the edge of the bed. He pauses, looking. Others had done it, and so would he. He is Nunsk, a nightmare of the mortal realm, soon to deliver a horror of the night so [...]
Our Grandma Uzoma forbade us from going into her kitchen after midnight. She claimed the freezer was possessed. She said one time a bag of frozen mixed vegetables pushed a carton of vanilla ice cream out of the freezer and onto the floor—where the ice cream turned to liquid by morning. She said the two [...]
