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I first saw them one evening in May. I couldn’t tell what they were: small, like kids, like me, but they rustled, raffia fronds for skin. My eyes fizzing with dreams, I found Mama cradled on the sofa, hugging herself. She wore that faded floral top she loved so much.
Math has never been my strong suit. Still, I’ve always rather enjoyed logic puzzles (particularly ones like Einstein’s Riddle), and after falling in love with Return of the Obra Dinn last year, I got really into the idea of using puzzles like these to build a narrative—especially a mystery.
There is something uniquely squalid and sad about estate sales. To traipse through a cluttered house, one of a teeming crowd here to bear witness to the end of a life and all that it held, not to pay respect but instead to lunge for whatever goodies you can find.
CW: violence, blood, death. It didn’t come as a surprise when AJ told me she wanted to open our relationship. We’d been an item for four years, but by the middle of the third year the two of us had long since checked out. You could feel it in the air: a static, something pushing […]
In early 2022, there was a comedian on TikTok, or at least I thought they were a comedian, who said, and I’m paraphrasing here: My biggest fear living in the city today is not crime or something scary happening—it’s actually some person with a camera and a mic running up to me, asking me to do something for a dollar.
When the American saw me sitting on a stone in the river, his mouth opened and closed, a brown trout caught on a fishing line. He kept his eyes on me as he hurried to pull off his socks and shoes, as if I would vanish otherwise. Then he rolled up the cuffs of his pants and waded into the shallow water.
I like car journeys in the passenger’s seat. They give me time to think and rethink things beyond the shape of my life. I’m not allowed to play music, but I can in my head. Places blur. Memories tangle. Pitying voices from long ago garble in my ear on the thickened tongue of regret. “Muniza,” my husband says, eyes on the road. “Your skin is slipping.”
Before we left camp, we were informed about the dos and donts for living in our respective communities, considering we were strangers. Happenings that we newcomers saw as strange should not be enough reason to contravene the laws of the land.
Chuck was wire-sick again, so he hobbled up onto Jerome’s porch one sunny afternoon, need curling his spine like a bent clothes hanger. Jerome was the guy who could get you whatever you needed, as long as what you needed was wire, or crank, or a pallet of Captain Chompberry cereal, or twenty cartons of stolen Lithuanian cigarettes.
Her fingers, then, had folded around the clay, her mind entranced. Her fingers traced the soft wetness, pressed gently, pressed firmly, bent, rolled, pulled, pushed. The clay yielded to her rough-skinned hands like a willing lover. She had bent closer to the orange-red clay and closed her eyes.
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