By: Cariou Beijing, China.May 16, 1966. Sunny. After school in the afternoon, our teachers asked students to sign up to join the Red Guards[i] while class cadres were compelled to join. At the age of thirteen, I didn’t understand what…
By: Carl “Papa” Palmer The first thing I notice every time I come to visit is the familiar aroma of this hallway smelling as if the same lavender laundry soap is used in every assisted living facility in Tacoma. I…
By: Clive Aaron Gill My name is Mwanza Mufulira, and I am sixteen. In Livingstone, Zambia, my parents and I live in a two-bedroom brick house with a corrugated steel roof. The city is named after David Livingstone, a Scottish…
By: John Randolph One of the twin window-panes decorating the one-story house glowed with yellow light like a lizard’s eyeball. Over the pane were black shades, broken such that one diagonal blind bisected the middle third of the window. An…
By: Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue Today I’m sitting in a waiting room of another psychologist. I keep being farmed out to different ones because I’m supposedly some kind of fucked-up mess. “He saw his dad’s dead body after he shot himself,” they…
By Russell Waterman It would be a lie to say Horace Lynch woke from a coma, even though his body told him so. But given the choice between a coma or reality, gambling on never waking up again was worth…
By: Don Tassone Jayden knew his father was home because he could hear his parents’ raised voices downstairs. To him, that sound was like nails on a chalkboard. He’d been looking at the news. Not that he was…
By: Sandy Fishnets Only God could see his hand trembling as he dragged the brush across the canvas. It wasn’t him painting—it was something else, something desperate, something screaming for release. The strokes came faster, more erratic, as though the…
By: Torsaa Emmauel Oryiman I had always dreamed of studying at one of the most prestigious universities in Nigeria, Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, University of Nigeria Nsukka, University of Ibadan, and others. I spent sleepless nights researching schools with the…
By David William Jurgenson Harding felt a pit of dread in his stomach as his boss Jeyaseelan called on him to talk about his end-of-year accruals. He smiled and said, “Um, eh, eh, hhhhhe. Sure.” Chowden’s eyes bulged, and for…