The scrap yard at the north end of my long city street hummed like a dystopic anthill, the day I drove up in my 15-year-old compact car, parked in front of a heap of flattened wrecks winking in an oily sun, got out, and made my way to a busy office where a woman with […]
Essays
Bike to the Future
Some Notes on the Nonexistence of Wakanda
by Gerry Canavan
Academics who study science fiction have typically been fixated on what they see as its privileged relationship with futurity. By imagining a possible shape for the future that will someday arise out of the present—however prescient, realistic, or patently ridiculous a particular author’s imagination of that future might be—science fiction narratives help restore to us […]
The Miracle of Ordinary
by Janette Schafer
The only things that remain of his past as a drug dealer are the physical indicators: pocked track marks in the creases of his arms, outlines of faded tattoos from decades ago, scars from the knife attacks of heroin-starved junkies or pushers trying to thrust themselves into his territory. He is a quiet older man […]
Good and Decent People
by Jerome Richard
We were standing on the parade grounds in Nuremberg where Hitler once addressed throngs of enthralled Germans. It was the scene of Leni Riefenstahl’s awe-inspiring propaganda film Triumph of the Will. Our guide for that morning told us that she was born in 1968 and that when she was old enough to learn about what happened […]
The Nightmare Next Door
by Tom Larsen
My mother is standing on a bench in the spare bedroom. I can see by the certainty of her movements that she’s done this before. “Look,” she points. “They turned the refrigerators around. Sanders must have told them I complained.” Through the window I can see two rusting refrigerators standing flush against the back of […]
The Gospel of Dearth
by Joshua Bernstein
“You have to be wealthy in order to be great.” – Donald Trump, campaign speech, Bismarck, North Dakota, May 26, 2016 In The Power Elite, his 1956 study of the powerful’s manipulation of the powerless, C. Wright Mills, the American sociologist, sounded what would probably be his most devastating critique of ingrained assumptions about wealth: […]
Changing
by Erinn Seifert
You lie awake, tired and lonesome underneath a horrifyingly new patchwork blanket of your dead grandfather’s old clothing. The boy dropped you off thirty minutes ago, and you walked the half mile up your secluded driveway in the middle of the last dark hour before dawn broke. The pine trees buzzed with morning birds and […]
What Kind of Parent Lets a Thirteen-Year-Old Cancel Her Bat Mitzvah?
by Leonard Kress
1. My favorite episode of Jill Soloway’s tragi-comic Transparent focuses on the family’s youngest daughter, Ali Pfefferman, who at age 13 refuses to celebrate her Bat Mitzvah. This is no small matter, since her mother has spent thousands on preparations—food, invitations, reception, booze, etc., and she’s both horrified and humiliated by the prospect of canceling. At first, […]
Red Memory
by Christian Sorace
After his collection of over 200 Chairman Mao souvenir buttons was stolen a few weeks prior, on February 25th, 2012, 71 year-old Li Decai used a red belt to hang himself from a beam two meters high in a shed in his bean and carrot field.1 Li Decai became a local celebrity in the county-town […]
Four Letters
by Michael Karl (Ritchie)
Dear Petronius, I used to climb to where the Latin texts were shelved, on the top floor of a very tall building appropriately called Acres of Books. Shuttered in that stifling room, with dust baking in the light of a lone sealed window during a particularly humid summer day, I rummaged among the books to […]
