Today, we are proud to present “My History With Careless People, and Other Stories” by Christian Winn. This irreverent and moving story examines what it is like to strive for a true human connection in a world in which people are careless, and you yourself are far from perfect. It’s surprising, dark, and real. Don’t miss this unique tale.

“A lot of times I’ve wanted it back, that hug, that series of moments, because there was a lot that would happen between Thom and me that we did not yet know would happen, and that hug was what was before all that.”

Carrie was this fat chick who lived next door and whose husband I stole, sort of, for a little while, until later she stole him back. I never liked Carrie, nor she me, but her husband, Thom, this balding sporting goods salesman, I always thought he was cute. He had a charming, gap-toothed smile that reminded me of David Letterman. Back then I loved to come home after the bar, crack a bottle of red and watch Letterman. This was when Letterman first started out, when late-night TV still seemed something you felt happy to stay up for.

One day in July, Carrie got run over by a school bus on her 10-speed. She died. And like that, Thom was a widower. And like that, their little boy, Carlton, was motherless.

I was crazy busy and didn’t hear about dead Carrie for a day and a half, though it seemed everyone else had—especially my nosey Mom and my brother, Zack. They knew details, and they didn’t even live in the neighborhood anymore. It was because our small city is not full of a lot of news about local moms dying in broad daylight beneath a school bus.

And then things got blown up even more because it turned out the bus driver was a deadbeat dad and a parole violator from three states away. This intrigued people like Zack and Mom.

Me, I felt some sadness as a fellow human, but I was mostly relieved not to have Carrie staring knife eyes at me every time I saw her. I often felt hate coming off fat dead Carrie and landing on me, and I was glad she was gone from my life.

When we ended up at Carrie’s funeral that next weekend Zack told me trustworthy rumor had it Carrie was weaving her way back from The K-Club’s happy hour, had blown through a stop light and was eating a Rueben sandwich when she got run over. Though it seemed more than halfway believable, I thought maybe this was just Zack being Zack—being an idiot, standing up for my side of things. He’d often heard me talk shit about Carrie. We are loyal people, except to our father who’s gone, out there somewhere in the world, don’t matter.

We were within the warm huddle of Carrie’s funeral mourners when Zack whispered, “My friend, Mike Cunningham, he works the grill at the K, made that Rueben special for her—extra kraut, extra sauce.”

“Doesn’t mean getting mowed down was her fault,” I said.

Someone hushed me from two rows back. I held up my middle finger.

“Rueben sando ends up half-eaten on the gory cement?” Zack whispered. “Thousand Island dressing and Swiss cheese end up across her neck?”

I shrugged.

The pallbearers, including Thom, floated her coffin through the church.

“Bet they’ll have sore shoulders tomorrow,” Zack said, snorting.

I pinched his skinny rib hard, but he didn’t flinch.

Interestingly enough, as Zack whispered the details of fat Carrie’s demise, who I felt sorriest for was that bus driver. He was fucked—arrested and humiliated with his happy I’m-a-good-man-trying-to-make-my-life-okay-again school district ID photo all over the news. Even if killing Carrie wasn’t truly his fault, it seemed pretty obvious his life was now fractured beyond repair because of a careless person’s carelessness.

To read the rest of “My History With Careless People, and Other Stories” click here.

Today, we are thrilled to publish “A History That Brings Me to You” by Katie M. Flynn, the second-place winner of our Winter Short Story Award for New Writers. This story astounded us. It toggles between the point-of-view of a twelve-year-old girl whose parents are in the midst of a divorce and a neighbor across the way. The manner in which their narratives coalesce—and differ—is what makes this story so beautiful.

“Her father. That’s who her mother had been on the phone with. She knew that tone, that specific tenor of anger—only for him. Her mother hated him, the girl realized. Her mother hated her father. And then she knew it: he would have had to have done something truly terrible to make her mother hate him so, for her to carry this much rage.”

The Watson girl had only been missing a matter of minutes, yet she could feel the tension mounting, the disaster taking shape. Her cousins were calling her name loudly, angrily, like she should reveal herself, but there was no way she was going to do that. At home she’d given up on hide and seek. All the spots in her flat Tulsa house had long ago been scouted and discovered. Her mother had to pretend not to know where she was, and that wasn’t any fun, so the Watson girl played other games. But here, in Mankato, Minnesota, in a game that sprawled her aunt and uncle’s two-bedroom apartment and the mortuary below, hiding spots abounded. At first, she’d wandered the showroom, running her hands along those shiny wooden caskets with their silken insides, considered climbing in. No, that would have been too obvious. So she pushed past the door her uncle had specifically said not to open, the only room in the whole place where she wasn’t supposed to go. It was obvious why, the dead woman lying on a table, her pores showing like caverns through unevenly applied foundation, her cheeks green despite the clownish pink blush. The girl gently poked the woman’s cheek. Then she tried to lift an eyelid, which didn’t come easily, until she saw why—a flesh-colored disc, spiked and holding it in place. She pulled away, the eyelid half raised to terrifying effect, the spiked disc poking out.

She climbed into the waiting coffin, which she assumed belonged to the dead woman, who was not old in the way of a grandmother, but middle-aged like the Watson girl’s mother and very slender in her pale blue skirt suit. The girl liked the color choice, the shade of sky, and it made her like the woman, and she told her so, “I like you,” before she closed the lid, marveling at the chill the white silken fabric pulled from her skin. She was alive, in a dead woman’s box, and she knew she shouldn’t be there. Still, she didn’t get out. She did, however, reach down and remove her shoes, placing them on her chest so she’d be the only thing they’d dirty.

She could hear her cousins, those giants. They were teenage, the girl a senior who played center on the high school’s basketball team and had colossal thighs, always in shorts. The boy was only a year younger and stocky, a football player and a bit of a lady’s man, she’d heard her aunt say to her mother over their afternoon cocktail. He liked to tickle the Watson girl, who was twelve and still had the arachnid legs of a child, to get on top of her and make her laugh until a little pee escaped, a type of torture. He was handsome in a mean way and she was afraid of him. She could hear them on the other side of the door, trying to decide what to do. They agreed to check the yard out front, and she heard them go, and she was glad.

To read the rest of “A History That Brings Me to You” click here.

Today, we are proud to present “Lepidomancy,” the second-place winner of our Fall Fiction Contest judged by Brian Evenson. This story blew us away from the start. In “Lepidomancy,” there exists a conservatory full of butterflies who can foretell people’s future. Hannah and her husband Steven have a daughter with a rare chromosomal disorder, and they must decide whether or not to take her to see the butterflies.

“The butterflies don’t seem to care for questions about the future of humanity, the outcomes of wars, the meaning of life. They won’t reveal winning lottery numbers, name which horse to bet your retirement fund on, or proclaim the outcome of an election. You can’t ask questions about someone else, either—only the personal is under their purview.”

The fortune-telling butterfly conservatory first opened in Beijing two years ago, in the refurbished Olympics velodrome, and when it became clear this wasn’t a stunt or a hoax, people waited in line for days to glimpse their destinies. A couple of months later the conservatory moved on to a stadium-sized complex erected in place of an abandoned Soviet-era village near Moscow, and people traveled from as far as Magadan to ask their questions. Cape Town, Oslo, Dubai, Adelaide followed. It’s the oldest human desire, to attempt some measure of control over the vagaries of fate. The butterflies arrived in their first North American location a month ago—a gleaming glass dome near Dead Horse Bay in south Brooklyn. The feverish buzz is that the butterflies haven’t been wrong once yet. Sitting up in bed at night, a pillow bunched behind her lower back, the laptop screen dimmed almost to black so as not to wake up Steven beside her, Hannah tracks the butterfly news stories, eyewitness reports, forums, with a hunger that won’t let her sleep. The steady hiss of their daughter’s ventilator from the next room fills the night.

*     *     *

When Hannah comes into the University of Pittsburgh Department of Biology office Monday morning, everyone is clustered around Beth’s desk with the kind of strained, zealot attention that can only mean one thing.

“I went!” Beth calls to her from the middle of the congregation.

There are five people in the office who have visited the butterflies already. Antoine—Dr. Siegal—was shown that he’ll meet his future spouse on a dog sledding trip, so he immediately booked a week-long excursion to the Yukon during winter break. They told the facilities services manager, Inna, that she’ll die at ninety-two, so she started smoking again after a decade on the wagon, sometimes sucking on two cigarettes at once. Arslan the grants administrator wouldn’t share what he asked or how the butterflies replied, but he was off for a week afterward and came back quiet, withdrawn, his gaze failing to find purchase on anything.

“I’m going to have three grandbabies!” Beth says. Her office is decorated with photos of her family clothespinned to a length of twine zigzagging across the wall, a progression of her only daughter featured in baby photos, graduation portraits, sun-lit vacation snaps, interspersed with evil eye charms and origami cranes dangling from strings.

“How did they show you?” asks Lee, the international student liaison, who went to the conservatory a week ago with her whole extended family as though it was Disneyland.

“Drew it—there I was, a toddler in my lap and two older children, a boy and a girl, sitting crosslegged beside me, looking up at me. I seem to be telling them a story.” Beth holds up her palms as though the image is still there, a fragile daguerreotype of her future progeny.

To read the rest of “Lepidomancy” click here.

Today, we are pleased to present the third-place winner of our Fall Fiction Contest judged by Brian Evenson: “Together, Maureen” by Amanda Emil Anderson. In this story a woman, Maureen, literally becomes two different people after the sudden loss of her husband. The new Maureen and the old Maureen are left to mourn their loss together and to figure out the next step in their lives.

“Despite the visitors, Maureen and Maureen are mostly alone. Trailing one another from the living room to the kitchen, or waiting to turn into the driveway with the blinker softly ticking, the old Maureen will be struck with a thought: that was my life, and now this is. The idea plays in her head like a mantra. How strange, at this age, to get to know a new version of herself.”

First there is Maureen pacing a wide cement dock, watching rescue divers dip below the frozen lake and emerge minutes later numbed, empty-handed. This for hours.

Everything that comes after—condolences, casseroles—will happen to a different Maureen. The Maureen of now worries the lid of a gas-station coffee long gone cold. She tucks strands of gray hair under her hat, shuffles her boots against cement. By this point she could tell you many things about the dock: forty-five steps long, twelve steps across, pebbled and barnacled and slick with black ice where the lake has lapped up over its bounds. Large enough for a number of boats to tie up (in better weather), for over a dozen police officers to cluster, walkie talkies squealing, and yet the expanse feels too small to contain her.

She, this Maureen, still thinks there is a chance, or did think so; the feeling recedes with the sliding sun, lower and lower as the lake and horizon blur into an endless icy blue.

*      *      *

No—first is Whit, raspy-voiced and reedy, neither bad nor good. Whit manning the fuel pumps at his uncle’s gas station. Whit silent beside her at a school dance, his hand a thrill against her back. In an army uniform, in waders, in a borrowed suit on their wedding day. Whit who is not quite the man she expects, after they marry, but then again who is?

There is Whit with his hand a vice at the nape of their sons’ necks, just daring them to fuck up. His hand a vice around her wrist. Whit in his recliner with the TV blaring, and at the dinner table forking peas into his mouth, nothing to say, and in their still dark bedroom during deer season, soft and tender, telling her to get back to sleep while he tugs on thick socks. There is Whit at the end, collapsing through the ice with a Bud in one hand and a fishing pole in the other.

But there’ll be time enough to think on this later.

A diver is pulled back to the dock on an inflatable raft. Shivering, weak, he unhitches a harness from his shoulders. “It was like looking through tissue paper under there,” he says.

She thinks of an elementary school project, crinkled waves and seaweed inside a shoebox. Whit a flimsy paper doll glued to the cardboard.

The police chief guides her toward land. “I’m sorry. We’ll continue the recovery when conditions improve,” he says, and she’s lived through enough winters to know the difference between a rescue and a recovery. Overnight the temperature will plummet and ice will clot every opening in thick, jagged slabs. There’s no chance of finding him alive. Now they are only hoping for a body.

A new Maureen lets the chief lead her toward her car. The old Maureen waits a moment longer at the edge of the lake, not so easily convinced, then hurries to catch up to herself.

To read the rest of “Together, Maureen” click here.

It’s almost Valentine’s Day again. Yeah, the holiday can be kind of schmaltzy, but it’s nice to have an entire day dedicated to showing affection for the people we care about. To help celebrate we have compiled a list of some of our favorite stories from our New Voices section, which features fiction and narrative nonfiction by emerging writers published online. Whether you want to celebrate your love for your partner, your family, or your pet—or if you simply want to read a tale in which all men are zombies—we have a story for you.

 IF YOU LOVE YOUR PET

If your furry companion occupies a special place in your heart, you will adore Jessica Lee Richardson’s story “House Hunt.” In it, a woman searches for a new home with her best friend, who just so happens to be a lion. One of our favorite lines: “The love I had for this lion was like a stake made of piano keys driven through the throat. Thick, painful, echoing.” Just read it.

 IF YOU LOVE STAR WARS

While intergalactic travel may be the principal factor uniting the Star Wars series and Samuel Jensen’s brilliant, quiet “Sarajevo,” I think that we can all agree that love stories are infinitely more romantic when they’re set in space. “Sarajevo” takes place in the future on a moon that is light years away from earth. In a cave on this distant moon, a deaf geologist miraculously hears—for the first time—the voice of her lost love. Trust us: you will be moved. Read the story here.

IF YOU’RE FEELING CYNICAL

If you’re looking for a story about relationships that is realistic, but not romantic, you will love “That Was Me Once” by Megan Cummins. In this story, a man facing possible jail time spends an afternoon tagging along with his ex-wife. While he entertains romantic notions about this past relationship, his current girlfriend waits for him at home. He says about the two women: “I turn away from Dani, but the idea that I would go to her, if beckoned, keeps a steady pace with my love for Mara.” Continue reading here.

IF YOU’RE INTO THE SUPERNATURAL

 In “Clean Hunters” by Lena Valencia, Emily and her husband Gabe share a passion for ghosts. They are clean hunters, searching for spirits not with fancy detection equipment, but with their natural Sense. However, when they travel to a famously haunted New England inn to celebrate their anniversary, tension in their relationship mounts. “Clean Hunters” is an illuminating examination of the notions of dependency and deception in relationships. Dive in here.

IF YOU WANT TO CELEBRATE YOUR FAMILY

William Pei Shih’s “The Golden Arowana” is a beautiful examination of the love of family across different generations. In this story, a man and his grandmother take a road trip to claim a valuable fish. “The Golden Arowana” was the second runner up in our Short Story Award for New Writers and each one of its sentences shimmers. Read the whole story.

IF YOU’RE JUST SO OVER IT

If you are simply done with all of the Valentine’s Day sappiness, let us suggest “Life After Men” by Dale Bridges, in which all men are zombies. The author had this to say about his piece: “Turning the male population into mindless, bloodthirsty zombies allowed me to reduce “men” to a convenient metaphor without being too literary about it. Emily has been hurt by all the men she has ever known, but she’s still drawn to them. She loves them, but she also wants them to die. I think that’s how I would feel about men if I was a young woman.” Read on.

IF YOU CRAVE THE INEXPLICABLE

In “Katie Flew Again Tonight” by Trent England, a man struggles with the fact that his wife can fly. He knows that, eventually, she will fly out their apartment window, never to return. This story examines our desire (and inability) to protect those we love. It is a moving meditation on marriage. Read it here.

IF YOU ARE FEELING NOSTALGIC 

“Iron Boy Kills the Devil” by Sheldon Costa is set in a speculative world in which drones from a large company are the only source of supplies for a small, rural town. However, it evokes the feeling of coming of age and coming into your own. This exacting story is told from the point of view of fourteen-year-old Iron Boy. It touches on the discovery of sexuality and reminds us of the power of youthful optimism in a beautiful, rough, and unforgiving world. Discover the story here.

Browse our full New Voices archive here.

by Sadye Teiser

Today, we are pleased to present “Mistakes of Thought” by shimmering new voice Youmi Park. This unique and cutting story delves into what it feels like to experience injustices and acts of discrimination that go unacknowledged by those who witness them. Please join us in welcoming this exacting story to our library.

“There are these insensitive things people do and say without even knowing, without even thinking about it, and in some cases, with good intentions. I’ve heard people say, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ In Japanese, it’s called ‘mistakes of thought.'”

I found my Mama in the front yard garden, caught up by the next-door neighbor again. That mouth-running, frizz-hair broad in jean shorts was holding a finger in front of Mama’s face, bouncing it five times in front of her eyes. She was enunciating and talking at her real slow, like Mama was an animal that wanted a treat, and I didn’t like the way Mama was looking back: like an animal that wanted to run. I know hurt when I see it. You don’t have to tell me.

So I walked out of the garage with my arms crossed and said, “What’s going on?”

Mama’s body stiffened. She had her hands cupped in front of her, holding poppy flowers, the dirt from the roots freckling her yellow dishwashing gloves, which she prefers to regular gardening gloves. That’s what she’s always used. Latex is just easier to clean and a woman’s got to be practical if she wants her work to get done. And that’s what she was doing, getting work done, planting new poppy flowers, until this neighbor got in her face with her finger and slow talk.

“What’s going on, Lilah?”

“Oh, Maki, oh, good,” Lilah said. “Come here and listen to this.”

She swung her rawhide arm around Mama’s shoulder and turned her toward me as I walked over. Mama gave me a quizzical look, wide-eyed and eager, like she was trying to convince me to feel something other than what I was feeling. Mama, she’s so small, her eyes looked like they were taking over her entire face. They were—and I can say this for certain because I got up close—wet with unease.

I kicked the empty flower carton out of my way, spreading dirt between us.

“Your mother here was telling me about her new caretaking job?” the willowy broad said. “And you know what she said? She said, ‘My schedule is set illegulaly.’” She bounced her fingers in my face. She repeated, “Ille-gul-lay.”

Mama looked up at me and shrugged.

“I told her to never say that again!” Lilah said, rattling Mama’s shoulders. “My god, what if people think she’s saying illegally? What if they think she’s an illegal worker?”

“I’ve been a citizen since 1998,” Mama said.

“Well, all the more reason that we don’t want people thinking she’s an illegal.” Lilah flashed her teeth, her stupidity damping the air and wetting her lips. “And that’s why we were having ourselves a vocabulary lesson. Say it with me, Kimmi.” She lifted that finger again. “I-rre-gu-lar-ly.”

“I-lle-gu-lal-ly,” Mama repeated.

“I-rre-gu-lar-ly.”

“I-lle-gu-lalllllll-ly.”

“That’s pretty good.” Lilah turned to me, leaned forward, and whispered, “The R’s are the hardest, aren’t they?”

She smiled widely at Mama, who tightly pulled the back of my shirt. I felt like I was being suspended from a skyscraper, way up high past the atmosphere of real life, with just that point—Mama’s grip on my dirty t-shirt—holding me back from falling, arms swinging.

“That’s good, though, Kimmi! That’s really, really good,” Lilah said in baby talk. She waved her arm once and walked back to her patch of the street.

“See you both on Garage Sale Day,” she said. “Looking forward to what you have for me this year.”

To read the rest of “Mistakes of Thought” click here.

Today, we are proud to welcome “Night Vision” by Glori Simmons to our New Voices library. In this story, an American soldier stationed in Iraq faces—and crosses—moral lines. This story is deftly written, moving, and precise. It is part of Glori’s collection, Carry You, which is forthcoming from Autumn House Press in March.

“Patrolling that night, Clark had the feeling that they shouldn’t be there. . . . He hated the false security provided by the night vision goggles. They made it too easy to confuse oneself—to forget that while the goggles revealed what was out there, they did not conceal the man wearing them.”

The guy was just standing there, killing time. These were the words Clark used to describe the first guy he shot in the war—to Tibbs and Lyons and the other soldiers, to the lieutenants and the cheek-biting captain with his chest full of brass pins, but never to Ned. To get back on track, he’d take a deep breath, sniff hard, and spit the thick phlegm near his boot. Killing time, that’s how it all had started.

*     *     *

Clark and Lyons stood guard in the wide basement hallway they called the Dungeon, a place where weapons had been stored even in Hussein’s day. In the pitch black, Clark couldn’t see much of anything except for the blue glow of the light Tibbs kept on his key ring, which was dimming as he and Ned disappeared further down the hallway. They’d had a few beers, courtesy of a source that Ned refused to divulge, just as he’d refused to explain what it was he was looking for in the armory. It was a Tuesday, past curfew. This was one of the many stupid things the guys did to unwind and forget the gore of the day, one of the many things they did to kill time.

As Clark’s eyes adjusted he was able to make out the neckless outline of Lyons who was rocking back and forth like a boxer in the ring just before the bell went off. Clark didn’t like Lyons; the feeling was mutual. “You hear that?” Clark asked.

“Rats.”

“I think one just ran across my boot.”

“I’ve been trying to stomp on their tails,” Lyons said.

“I can take about two more seconds of this.”

“Copy that.”

They stood in the dark a few more minutes until the armory door slammed shut and they could hear Ned punching in the alarm code. He and Tibbs hurried toward Clark and Lyons with four bulky contraptions in their uplifted hands: night vision goggles.

“Follow me, men,” Ned said, and once again Clark found himself following Ned without asking questions.

To read the rest of “Night Vision” click here.

Today, we are thrilled to publish “Private Affair” by New Voices author D.S. Englander. In this quiet and powerful story, a man feels fiercely protective of his wife, who is receiving threatening letters from one of her students. This is complicated by the man’s reflections on his own history with women.

“He had met Ali in his early thirties after a long lonely stretch of years. She had changed his life. He felt only horror at the thought that she could somehow be hurt or taken from him.”

A light breeze played through the windows of the Subaru, and it felt refreshing to Desalt, who was visibly perspiring behind the steering wheel. It was hot, hotter than was normal for May. He tried to inch a little closer to the gearshift, to escape the sun’s glare, but that didn’t do much. The whole parking lot was baking.

He watched the doors to the school, where his wife would appear. Presently, it was mobbed with activity. Teenaged boys were filing out, dressed in khaki pants and oxford shirts. It was a uniform that he thought marked them for future corporate lives. Some wore blazers, and Desalt noticed two boys with white ball caps pulled low on their brows, as if they were a pair of executives about to hit the links. He pulled the lever on his seat back in disgust, and reclined just enough to give the tightness that had been bothering him lately in his lower back some relief. He tried closing his eyes against the sun’s glare, but that didn’t work.

The school was a brick building with little flourishes and buttresses from another century, three, four stories high. From where he sat, Desalt could see the curtains billowing in the high, second-floor windows, perhaps in one of the classrooms where his wife taught. It was a pretty building, capped off with an old-fashioned clock tower, complete with roman numerals and handsome greenish metal. Yet, even in the full bloom of May, there was something a little foreboding about the school. Perhaps it was the generations of students who had passed through its doors, the sum total of old exertions and humiliations.

He watched the students form a loose column to the flat roofed athletic building, at the end of the parking lot. They were hapless as they walked through the parked cars, oblivious to his presence in the driver seat of the Subaru. He imagined they would drift through their lives in a similar fashion, hardly aware: to college, their first jobs, straight up through middle management. Even as he thought this, he knew it wasn’t true either.

Some were probably his wife’s students. While he had listened to Ali describe her students, and even remembered names, he would never be able to match those names up to faces. In any case, he couldn’t think one generous thought about these kids. One of them may be the one threatening his wife, leaving lewd notes and promises of violence.

To read the rest of “Private Affair” click here.

Today, we are pleased to share with you the second place winner of our Short Story Award for New Writers: “The Devil is a Liar” by Nana Nkweti. This story is told from the alternating perspectives of a mother and her adult daughter. It examines the differences, and similarities, between how each woman experiences her faith as the daughter is faced with a difficult decision after learning about a possible complication with her pregnancy. 

“After the call ends, Glory begins a catchall, cover-all prayer, infused with every blessing she has ever wanted for her only living child. But above all, she hopes her prayers will fortify her too-strong daughter whose voice—muttering “goodbye”—had been so breathy and fragile, one of wind chimes forlorn and tinkling in an airless room.”

There are hymns, there are hosannas, there are hallelujahs. There are some who are struck dumb in His presence and those who are newborn linguists—speaking in tongues. Eyes roll heavenward, limbs grow palsied, tears—of joy, of penitence, of defiance—are shed. Through this sound, this fury; Sister Glory Ngassa, Minister of Music for the New Africa International Church of the Holy Redeemer, Brooklyn Battalion, is praying fervently. Her voice, once whispery, rises, then rises again as she sways to the unsung chorus moving the faithful, twenty-person flock present for service that Sunday morning. And faithful they are to the fledgling church—its sanctuary, the front room of a dusty, Brooklyn apartment, a donated space still under a slow-going renovation which has spanned from Easter Sunday the year prior into an unknown future—unto the end of days, perhaps.

The congregation is sanguine in their shared burdens. Tried and tested; they will not be found lacking. So one had to watch one’s step on the unfinished floorboards; a mere reminder that Jesus himself was a carpenter, a man who knew the grain of cedar, of poplar, of acacia, and even of the bitterest wormwood. So the single-paned windows were unsealed and unshielding; their translucent tarp coverings fluttered in the draft like a host of angels’ wings. Yes, the congregants of the New Africa International Church of the Holy Redeemer know they are blessed. Their leader, Man of God, Pastor Godlove Akondeng, had journeyed all the way from church headquarters in Cameroon to share his special anointing. That very moment, the good pastor is laying hands on the forehead of Brother William—timbering all six feet of the man into the waiting arms of Sister Anna, chanting, “By the Spirit of Christ. By the Body of Christ. By the Blood of Christ.” Raining down rapid-fire holy fire to break the ancestral curses that had kept the good brother from receiving his promotion, his increase.

Now, Sister Matilda walks up haltingly with her husband. Unequally yoked these two, yet twined and twinned to each other in a Siamese lockstep. She, crutching herself against him in deference to a newly acquired limp. He, clutching her piety to him like a security blanket, eyes darting then downcast, seemingly evincing a sudden bashfulness at the knowledge that Glory, and all those present, know that he was the one who had hobbled his wife, disordered her steps. Pastor Godlove takes hold of the man. He prays, shouts, commands the evil spirit possessing the husband to release him. Release him in the name of God the Father, release him in the name of the Holy Spirit, release him, Jehovah-jireh; thy will be done.

And now music. Now songs of praise and thanksgiving.

Glory steps forward. She pushes up her +1.5 drugstore reading glasses—perhaps it is time for +2?—and peers down at her hand-assembled hymnal, the photocopied fruit of her labors to harvest gospel songs from back home, from across the continent: Nigeria’s Joe Praize, Cameroon’s Tribute Sisters, the Soweto Gospel Choir.

“Jesus we love you, Lord. You don make my life betta. I go de thank you for evamore, thank you Baba,” sings the congregation, keeping time by the baton of Glory’s pointer finger, tap-tapping notes in the air. She is gratified. There is no instrumental accompaniment to this chorus of warbling voices—Sister Anna is always flat!—yet she knows to her marrow that their voices are pleasing to He who matters utmost.

To read the rest of “The Devil is a Liar” click here.

Today, we are proud to present Betty Jo Buro’s essay “A Pack a Day.” In this piece, Buro looks at smoking through many different lenses: from growing up in a household of smokers in the sixties, to becoming a mother herself, to watching the toll that a lifetime of smoking has on her parents. This essay is honest, vivid, and moving. Please join us in welcoming it to our New Voices library.

“One night, while my parents sit at either end of the dining room table, drinking their after-dinner coffee and smoking their after-dinner cigarettes, my sister Nancy reproduces an experiment suggested by her third-grade teacher. She has my father exhale his cigarette through a clean white tissue, and when he does, it leaves behind a brown smudge. She holds the Kleenex up by its corners for all to see.”

One

When I tell my sisters I want to write about smoking, their memories arrive clothed in nostalgia, as if our childhood spent breathing secondhand smoke in a stuffy station wagon was somehow enchanted. Patty fondly recalls her own first cigarette, an illicit Viceroy she puffed while crouched behind a sand dune at Good Harbor Beach with her best friend Allison. Susie reminds us how much fun smoking was, and suggests we all take up the habit again. Nancy remembers the brands my grandparents smoked—soft packs of Salems and Kents—and I am drawn in, transported to my grandparents’ Ohio living room. My grandfather’s silver lighter lies flat in the palm of my hand, cool and heavy. I run my fingertips over the names of his eleven grandchildren, engraved in small cursive script on its face. How many times had I watched him tilt his wrist to flip open the top? And then, with an expert flick of his thumb, produce the heady scent of lighter fluid, and as if by magic, a tall yellow flame.

Two

All of my first impressions appear in soft focus; our home a foggy haze, the faces of my parents separated from me by a veil of exhaled smoke. The scent of it permeates the wallpaper, the nubby plaid upholstery of the family room couch, the window curtains, my hair, and all of my little-girl clothes. But if you ask me what my childhood smelled like, I will tell you it smelled of percolated Maxwell House, my mother’s Jean Nate After Bath Splash, the rubbery scent of Barbie doll skin, of Breck shampoo and Ivory soap. The smoke was background, constant. I grew up on it, just like I grew up on Cheerios and Gilligan’s Island reruns, concentrated orange juice and am radio stations. I knew no different. Every place I went, I was cloaked in the invisible evidence of my parents’ vice, and all the while, I had no idea.

To read the rest of “A Pack A Day” click here.

Each October, we showcase otherworldly stories that send chills up our spines. Trent England’s “Katie Flew Again Tonight” is one such tale. It is written from the perspective of a man whose wife, Katie, can fly. As Katie’s flights grow longer, they both know that one day, she will fly out of their apartment window and never return. Neither of them knows precisely where she will go, but it is certain that she will no longer share her husband’s rooted, domestic life. “Katie Flew Again Tonight” is a beautiful and chilling examination of how we all deal with finality.

“I understand very little about how my wife flies; she does not have any physical qualities associated with creatures of flight, and for all other intents and purposes, she is entirely human.”

Katie flew again tonight. She woke me up when she crawled into bed, and soon after she fell asleep, I quietly slipped out of the room. I saw evidence in our apartment of her flight: black yoga clothes shed on the floor made a trail down the hallway toward the living room window, where under the sill lay her ballet flats, haphazardly shed in the sleepy stumble to the bedroom that she makes after a night of flying. Her discarded clothes had taken on the scent of the Manhattan grit outside our windows. Katie absorbs the city’s smells when she flies; they cling to her the way a telling perfume clings to a guilty shirt collar.

I returned to the bedroom, lit blue from the alarm clock, and I slid under the sheets, inching my way toward the bare outline of her sleeping body. I had already seen the time, and couldn’t avoid calculating how long she’d been out. As she slowly breathed, I watched the violin curve of her body rise and fall to its own musical time. I reached out and I fell asleep with one arm resting on her. It is in moments like these that I feel as if I, too, have flown.

To read the rest of “Katie Flew Again Tonight” click here.

Today, we are pleased to share with you the second place winner in our Flash Fiction Contest, “Lions in the House” by Beejay Silcox. This is a lovely, taut piece of flash. Through a discussion of nighttime noises in a house, this story reveals how two people in a relationship experience their anxieties differently.

“He’s never heard the lions in the house—this man, this husband, your husband. He has always slept in a way you can’t understand.”

There are lions in the house. Two, maybe three—it’s hard to tell. Filling the dark with their breathy territorial huffing, their stretched yawns and big-cat rumble.

It’s simple physics, acoustic trickery—the zoo is directly across the park and the sound carries. But there’s nothing simple about lions in the house. When you leave the windows open there’s something about the way the noise leaps around that makes it seem as if the lions are behind you in this new, old house—stalking you from kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, a kind of ventriloquism. If you close the windows, you can still hear them pawing against the glass.

No matter what you tell yourself, there’s that ever-open caveman eye in your brain that’s been waiting and watching—just for this, just for lions in the house. A hot-blooded part of you that always knew they were coming. And on nights when they do not come, when there’s wind or traffic or drunk street noise, this house with its rheumatic floorboards and recalcitrant hinges knows they will be back. It aches and strains and cracks its bones, and you’re awake, you’re awake, you’re awake.

He’s never heard the lions in the house—this man, this husband, your husband. He has always slept in a way you can’t understand. A careless sleep: reckless, unvigilant. When you first met you envied it, but now it terrifies you. How he can sleep through fire alarms and police sirens. How he once left a gas burner hissing and slept, as room-by-room, the air filled with oven fumes. How he can even sleep through your asthma attacks, that brutal underwater heaving that is so loud in your blood you can feel it echo for days.

To read the rest of “Lions in the House” click here.