Her skin peeled away. She didn’t believe it at first. She thought it was something else, maybe a layer of dead cells so thick it curled onto itself, but soon she could no longer ignore it, what emerged from underneath. [read online]
It feels to me as though sometime after my grandmother vanished, perhaps even the very next day, I’d taken a wrong turn and never looked back. [get issue]
There has always been a sparrow inside me. At first it was just an egg, something I felt in my belly before I even had the words for it. [read online]
• Reviewed by A.C. Wise (Locus), Paula Guran (Locus), Maria Haskins, Vanessa Fogg
This soup, you like it soured with fermented wheat bran, full of the herbs you can’t find where you live, and every year I make it redder, darker. [read or listen online]
• Recommended by A.C. Wise (Locus)
Little by little, I bloomed: a single clocktower (there is a tower at the heart of every living city), no bigger than a blade of grass, with little dirt roads radiating from it; then tiny red-roofed houses and a neoclassical theatre and kiosks on every corner and markets and packs of stray dogs. [read online]
• Reviewed by Maria Haskins, Charles Payseur (Locus)
💀 Forthcoming in Afterlives: The Year's Best Death Stories • July 2024
Amar never touched the pomegranates. If I ever bought one, I’d take it home like a dark secret and eat it when he wasn’t there. [read online]
• Reviewed by Vanessa Fogg
