Short fiction by Luke Mogelson and Raj Ramaswamy

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I was staring at a brown sky.  Just moments earlier, a researcher from the United Nations Ornithological Department had told me that fecal particulate from the city's open sewage system made up an alarming proportion of the atmosphere in Kabul.  The researcher was the sort of person who would say, "If you really want something to write about . . ." or "You're looking for a story?  What if I were to tell you . . . ," as if, before meeting him, you had lived in darkness, scribbling claptrap of zero consequence to anybody.  He'd invited me to lunch because he had some urgent information regarding birds.  Something to do with the great migrations above the Hindu Kush, the desertification of Iranian wetlands, mass extinction.  "Have you ever seen a Siberian crane?" he asked me.  "No, you haven't.  No one in Afghanistan has seen a Siberian crane in the past twenty years."
        I pretended to take notes.  My notepad, back then, was mostly pretend notes.  Many of the pages featured detailed sketches of me killing myself by various means.  One especially tedious interview—with a mullah, another fucking mullah holding forth from behind a vertical index finger—had yielded a kind of comic strip of me leaping from a skyscraper, shooting myself in midair, and landing in front of a bus. . . . 
--From "Total Solar," a short story by Luke Mogelson, The New Yorker (February 29, 2016), pp. 58-63.

"Thank you, come again," this cop is saying in an impressive fake accent.  He's saying it to me, even though I'm the one standing here behind the register.  Even though I'm the quote-unquote Indian guy.  He's saying it to me because I won't say it to him, never have, never will.  I force a grin at him, and he pushes on out into the night, free coffee in hand.  It's this routine he has.  A joke.
--From "Night Shift," a short story by Raj Ramaswamy, Exposition Review (Flash 405, November 2015).