Fiction – swamp pink

Frog!

October 6, 2026

The summer before I was fifteen, I got my first period, and then my sister took me to a robbery. I had never been to a robbery before. I would never have dreamed of going to a robbery if it weren’t for her, but she made me want to do dangerous things. Or more like, I already...

EVENING AFTER EVENING

October 1, 2026

Our King Lear has serious acne and every girl in summer camp is in love with him. Lear needs to wield a certain authority over the cast, a challenge when all your actors are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. Moira, the camp’s head director, picked Markus because he’s the tallest and has the...

Changeling

September 30, 2026

On any given day, Miranda hears the children before she sees them. The sounds they make as they hang their backpacks from hooks, as they huff and hustle and huddle into clusters, sometimes squealing, sometimes spraying secrets into one another’s ears. But she always waits until final bell to open the door. Even if she is prepared, she waits....

Ornithology

September 30, 2026

—in memory of Charlie Parker, seventy years gone “The beauty of mathematics only shows itself to more patient followers.” —Maryam Mirzakhani That morning before I left for work, my son James asked me, Can people fly? He can, I said. James was sitting cross-legged on the floor holding his ankles and looking up at Kenderick Lamar’s video “Alright” playing on...

Everything’s Fine at The Greenbrier!

August 26, 2026

Sunday, 3 September 2023 I am staring at an incinerator for human bodies, fantasizing about climbing in for a nap. But the cast iron door—a squeeze, but I’d fit, I think—is mounted far too high up, at chin level. Perhaps to discourage me from throwing myself in. This place thinks of everything. I’m deep underground in...

The Five Remembrances

August 26, 2026

about the last day the continents touched—and there wasa last day—or the last night a chunk of earth split off, became the moon —“Land Masses,” Jennifer Martelli (1962-2025) Amble in one direction—there’s no loop trail in these woods. Aging’s about bureaucracy, its tedium, and border crossings that close behind you, and the cusp of nothing:...

Satyricon

August 26, 2026

The only thing my mom ever told me about my dad was that he was in a Fellini movie, which if I’m being honest is probably the only reason I would ever watch that kind of movie in the first place. It’s called Satyricon, I don’t even know how to describe it, like arthouse Greek mythology, or maybe Roman mythology, I guess. Some of the reviews I read after my mom died called it oneiric, which I learned was just a fancy word for dreamlike. But it’s true, it’s a fancy movie. I think...

Herd Animals

The rest of my herd would laugh to hear it now, but when I was young, I wanted to be a mammoth. My world was small then. No mountains or rivers or great plains of grasses. I didn’t know about the wild elephants, how we were making our homes in the forgotten parts of America....

Seismogram

When they’re closing the gallery by themselves, Hughie and Ephraim touch their favourite artworks. Ephraim locks the permanent collection upstairs, where three polystyrene falcons hang from the ceiling. He stoops near a falcon to hold its tail between his fingertips. The falcons are white, cold and smooth, with outspread wings that feel to Ephraim like thinning bars of soap. The spotlights above them make trilateral...

Intruder

One morning before dawn, I saw a man standing in the doorway of my bedroom. I was thirteen. He stood in shadow, but I could see that he was a large man, tall and muscular with wild hair. I woke because I heard the loose board in the hallway shift, and I thought my mother had left her bath early, her skin already red and wrinkled. But then I saw the man....

excerpts from Three

The Woman Long before she became a mother, the woman was a little girl living with her parents in a compound shared with five other families. The compound had belonged to a landlord before it was confiscated and reallocated to a state-owned hardware company, to house its employees and their families. None of the original furniture...

Friendly People

A few months ago, before we exchanged hot and humid Lagos for grey and wet Seattle, the husband fell asleep to a playlist he’d curated of male immigration influencers mandating what-not-to-do the moment one’s Nigerian foot touched foreign soil. His earphones were still intact when I found him limp, but I noticed his ear canals were red...