creative prose

Bo didn’t know how long he’d been sitting on the cold tiled bathroom floor. Maybe five or ten or thirty minutes. He'd listened to the recordings over and over. His grandmother had been right, and he knew better now why they needed to keep their gift a secret. He...

I don’t dance, but I did with him that night. The air hung heavy and hot around our heads, and little gnats glanced off our skin like pinpricks. Unwelcome, but no real blood drawn. Chatter and clinks from other people’s night floated out into the fading evening. The...

  “Are we allowed to be here?” I asked as I looked down into the hole that would be a grave in a few short minutes. He stepped in to stand beside me. “If not, they’ll make us leave,” he said. We looked around and there was no one to make us leave, for the moment....

A pigeon sits atop a tree and gasps for breath back. Novelist Richard Price once gave the advice that “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You...

Upon the Aurès Mountains  a d VIII Id Jan, VII a r c1 (8 January 256 CE)  NumidiaModified after Karten von Römischen Provinzen (detail) from Römische Provinzen by Theodor Mommsen, 1921 via commons.wikimedia.org. © Bin im Garten. CC BY-SA 3.0In 256 CE, a mystic warrior...

Photograph by Clarissa Fragoso Pinheiro The few tenants left on Piazza di Santa Maria awoke to find a fallen palm tree lying in the middle of the square. The wind had caught it. A second palm remained five meters tall on the opposite side, alone and defiant. The early...

I was the last child of four — and the hardest to deliver. I feel a little bad about this fact, but I was getting even for being the runt of the litter. Whichever part of me would turn difficult years later decided it’s best to get even before I could be scolded. It’s...

“A silence like eternityPrevailed, there was no sound to hear;These marvels all were for the eyeAnd there was nothing for the ear” — “Parisian Dream,” Charles Baudelaire  He was one of the last people I expected to hear from. He gave me a call around 5:30 and asked me...

“Don’t forget to wash your eggs!” my mama warned me through a WhatsApp video call. Despite the lagging pixels, I noticed her eyebrows lift in that familiar concern of a parent whose child lives across the ocean. “They don’t do this here, Ma.” I whisked the eggs,...

Lungs of the World 2, Artem MirolevichKi? Kithe? Saanu ki? What, where, and why does it matter to us? This particular line of inquiry, as interconnected calls for clarification, substance, and location, rejects the abstract promises and pillars of liberal modernity1...

When I was young, I thought I could see well. I could see the bougainvillea planted out front of my childhood home. They thrive in full sun, making the Sonoran Desert I lived in a perfect habitat. I could see the grapefruit and lemon trees in my neighbors’ backyard....