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The first time he realized that there was something not quite right about him was when a woman crossed the street as she saw him coming. He thought it was a coincidence. Then it happened again.
He began to watch those around him. One day, on the Underground, a woman three empty seats away moved her handbag to her other side when she saw him. He wasn’t sure why.
After the fourth or fifth time something like that happened, he looked at himself in the mirror. He thought he was normal, like everyone else. But when he looked at himself through the eyes of those who clutched their handbags when they saw him he understood that his face was not as normal as he’d thought.
—From "A Wrinkle in the Realm," a short story by Ben Okri, The New Yorker (February 8, 2021), pp. 52-54. Okri is the author of several books including Prayer for the Living, a collection of stories (Akashic Books, 2021). My favorites from that book were all clumped together in the middle: "The Canopy" (pp. 75-77), "In the Ghetto" (78-85), and "Mysteries" (89-99). "Mysteries" was first published in the Sunday Times Magazine in 2009.
Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother's people came from. It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh where my father lost our red Shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew where the man who won the heifer sold her shortly afterwards. My father throws his hat on the passenger seat, winds down the window, and smokes. I shake the plaits out of my hair and lie flat on the back seat, looking up through the rear window.
—From Foster, a short novel by Claire Keegan (Grove Press, 2022). This book was first published in the United Kingdom in 2010 by Faber & Faber Limited.
After classes ended, I ran to the mountain behind our school. There was a small hut on the mountain where Yuki and I kept our secret pet. In my bag I had three bread rolls left over from lunch.
—From Life Ceremony, a collection of short stories by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Grove Press, 2022). This excerpt is from "Poochie" (pp. 63-68). My favorite stories from this collection were "A Summer Night's Kiss" and "Two's Family" (pp. 45-58), "The Time of the Large Star" (59-62), and "Poochie" (63-68).
She changes out of her jeans and caftan and into a starched white sari, applies makeup that accentuates the wrinkles around her eyes, then streaks her temples with washout gray and snaps on eyelash extensions. She takes another moment to fix her hair into a bun with two gilded bobby pins. The final touch is a red bindi placed in the absolute center of her forehead. She believes her clients are often struck by the bindi's perfect symmetry, the high cheekbones it calls into focus. It's simple enough to transform into an elderly woman, so simple in fact that she has begun to wonder, at forty-two, whether she's actually taken on the accoutrements of old age decades before her time.
—From "A Mother's Work," a short story by Jai Chakrabarti, One Story, Issue 294 (October 20, 2022).
I have all this clean air and can collect wild plants and hunt for fish. As long as I have the desire to work on a graphic novel, what's the problem? This is no joke . . . These days, I'm worried about just buying rice . . . I have a household that I'm responsible for. I can't just run away from life to work on a graphic novel. If I just had enough money to live a simple life . . .
—From Uncomfortably Happily, a graphic novel by Yeon-sik Hong, translated from the Korean by Hellen Jo (Drawn & Quarterly, 2017). The excerpt above is from page 84. This book was originally published in Korea as Bul-pyeon-ha-go haeng-bo-ka-ge (2012).