~
For example, I puffed on my inhaler
and watched the unnamed smoke creep
under my bedroom door as the music and
the loud voices boomed down the hall.
I knew never to call 911.
—From "evidence for the necessity of my removal by child protective services," a poem by Aliyah Cotton, Rust & Moth (Spring 2023).
That Sunday, I went to my girlfriend's house to pick her up. We went on dates pretending we were going to the library to study, so I always put various study-related items in my shoulder bag to keep up the facade. Like a novice criminal making up a flimsy alibi.
I rang the bell over and over, but no one answered. I paused for a while, then rang it again, repeatedly, until I finally heard someone moving slowly toward the door. It was my girlfriend's older brother.
—From "With the Beatles," a short story from First Person Singular, a collection of eight stories by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2021). The book was originally published in Tokyo, Japan, as Ichininsho Tansu (Bungei Shunju Ltd., 2020). A slightly different version of "With the Beatles" was published, with an illustration by Adrian Tomine, in The New Yorker (February 17 and 24, 2020). The excerpt above is from the hardcover book (p. 93).
Of course, with the students, they’re mostly not dumb enough to think they’ll have writing careers, or else they've self-published fifteen sci-fi novels since they graduated high school two months ago. (That guy doesn't seem the least bit anxious; he's got deadlines to meet.) Once upon a time, I smoked pot and if I wanted to describe a flowering pocomoke crepe myrtle shimmering fuchsia in a dry ditch, I did it without looking up "flowering bushes" and wondering where all the time went.
—From "Reflections After Googling 'How to Be Less Anxious About My Writing Career' and Finding the Same Bullshit I Tell My Composition Students," fiction by Lucas Flatt, Maudlin House (June 22, 2023).
My father says my problems are not problems.
What do you know? I think.
"What do you mean?" I say.
He turns to me. He grumbles about his car engine and his dead wife and something called a praws tate.
"My dead mother, you mean."
—From "Plums," a piece of flash fiction by Christopher Ghattas, StreetLit (April 21, 2023).
I am early. Take out my keys. Three women at the end of their evening's
work, in a tangle of sprawl, languish on the hood of a nearby car.
—From "Welcome to Summer School," a poem by Roxanne Cardona, San Antonio Review (June 21, 2023).