Stories

God Haunting

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1. In the beginning man created me in his own image. Male, he created me. Surprise, surprise. And I say “man,” but what I really mean is a boy. In…

Viper // Víbora

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Translated from Spanish by Allison A. deFreese   Code name: Margueritte   With short strokes, the man moves his arms to float in the brown water. The current can carry…

Timeshares

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When Nora’s children were children, she never permitted them to go to the zoo. She hated seeing animals in small spaces, away from their people, even if it was for…

Fists & Fingernails

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Your sanity or your apartment—it’s impossible to determine which one you lost first. There was a time, say four years ago, when you definitely still had both. You think of…

Heavy Metal

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Tall on the Scriptures and short on trust, folks in these parts agree about the primordial and problematic difference of outsiders. Citing Genesis 11: 6, Bible readers fear Nothing they…

Boys’ Night

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August 14—one year since the ban. To “celebrate” we all brought our finest bootleg equalizers, good and loaded. T-bone flaunted his homemade barrel and switch, and Barko fashioned a tracker…

Horn

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At first it was just a rough spot under his fingertips as he shampooed his hair. He would pick at it and scour it with conditioner, thinking it a strange…

Surveillance

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We were different. Our brothers liked the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History and dioramas of animals slaughtering each other, we had less interest. One brother was a bully,…