When Amie Souza Reilly and her family buy a New England home in August 2014, the real estate agent forewarns them about the two brothers next door. They were “nosy but mostly harmless,” the agent says. Reilly wonders, “Did she emphasize mostly?” The house promises suburban bliss. A tiny office with a string light. Hardwood […]
On the cusp of adulthood, Baadal and his two friends get into mischief in their Pakistani Town. They egg the house of a suspicious official. They go to the Town cinema (a home where their friend installed a new VCR). They flirt with nearby City girls, who clock their Town-ness in their brown pants. Baadal […]
Selah rides in an attollos – an elevator – with her colleague. After the recent murder of her father, she inherited the role of Imperial Historian to Sargassa, a speculative version of the Roman Empire divided over human enslavement. Almost 800 years after The Great Quiet, twenty-two-year-old Selah hopes to shift society with education reform […]
“I never believed something, / or somebody, could hold me,” writes Sarah Kersey in the title poem of their debut collection, Residence Time (Newfound, Oct 2024). They hope the biblical Moses will offer them wisdom on his adoptive mother, even as the sea rises. Instead, Kersey teaches themselves to swim: “I finally learned to float.” […]
You shipped them: Mulder and Scully. Some spooky guy hot for aliens, hair flopping tantrums at a bald FBI father figure. Too punk rock for paperwork, he rendezvoused in soft lit parking garages with strangers. She filed the official reports on slick gray creatures, straight-faced in her blazer. Snapped latex glove above autopsy table. Scalpelled […]