by Zia Jaffrey

Excerpt from a manuscript on South Africa

I don’t remember who we were planning to abduct. I may have got it wrong on the amnesty application. Maybe it was K in Soweto…
-(Security policeman, who shot his wife)

On the train back from Nyack to Manhattan, after having dinner with my sister, I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t gone that far in love with anyone, except Louis. My sister and Frank were guiding K on what to expect when he met my parents. That meant that they assumed that this was it for me–for us.

by Clare Cannon

photo by Tungsten Rising on Unsplash

Day 7

“Bomba. Over us,” my friend Anya, who cat-sat for me in Ukraine, typed into Messenger. “Pray. We are in corridor.” I slumped in the wooden chair where I sat at the Spear Physical Therapy clinic in Manhattan as I read, “Rocket was here.” My world exploded. My physical therapist Nada brought me a box of tissues and a cup of cold water. “My friend just got bombed,” I sobbed. 

“Clare, I’m so sorry,” she said in her lyrical Egyptian accent.

by Lisa McMaster

photo by Peter Anderson on Unsplash

It’s a dark November evening and the rain slants across the driveway and backyard. My mom and I have just returned from my piano lesson and I am in a good mood. I am singing something silly when I see my dad sitting at the dining room table, his face drawn tight, eyes down. I keep singing because he often doesn’t smile, or say hello, when I walk into the room. When he tells me to stop, his voice is sharp and I assume I have done something wrong.

by Yuko lida Frost

photo by Gabriel Matula on Unsplash

Let me tell you about seaweed. First, it gives us life. The ocean plant absorbs the sun’s radiant energy and carbon dioxide and in turn produces glucose and oxygen. The glucose is the nutrient all living organisms depend on. Ocean plants generate more oxygen than the world’s entire trees combined. They are our lifeline. 

Seaweed is also delicious. Sze Tue wrote in 600 BC that “some algae are a delicacy fit for the most honored guests, even for the King himself.” The record indicates that seaweed has been consumed daily in Japan since the eighth century.  

by Michael Cannistraci

It was 1979 in Los Angeles. I was twenty-two, struggling as an actor, and struggling in general. My dreams of stardom had fizzled after graduation from college; aside from taking expensive acting classes, I wasn’t performing anywhere. 

I got a job going door to door, recruiting men for a government vasectomy study. The work was easy, but the pay was lousy, and I had to buy my own gas. My girlfriend suggested I try bartending to make a living after she observed a bartender in a funky, dive surfer bar in Venice Beach counting a wad of cash on one of our dates.

by Natasha Williams

photo collection of the author 

The kitchen was thick with cigarette smoke and A Love Supreme, his favorite Coltrane. I danced with scarves wrapped around my undersized torso, one tied gypsy-like around my head. Dime-store clip earrings dangled at my neck. I twirled to his lap, where he slumped over his coffee cup at the dining room table, and pulled on his hand to join me. Anchored to his chair by something weightier than our life could contain, he chuckled, looking into his cup, waiting for the “holy” calling only he could hear.