After last night’s debate, I think we all need a breather. Thankfully, there’s been great new literature published online this month! If you need to step away from your world, if only for a moment, let these stories and essays take you somewhere new.
The Spirits of the House by Sheila Black | Kenyon Review, September 2020
Sometimes where we lived it did not rain for a hundred days, though you would often see virga—sheets of dark rain in the sky that evaporated—or how I loved this word—sublimed before they hit the earth.
I’ve Always Felt More Like You: On Disability and the Second Person by James Tate Hill | Brevity, September 2020
The perceptions of others hover constantly above the disabled, casting long shadows. You are blind; you are deaf; you are the special child. You cannot do this; you cannot be this; you are, to the many who choose not to know you, invisible.
But in your writing, you are only you: author, narrator, protagonist.
For a Good Time, Call by Natalie Lima | Guernica, September 2020
I hear the solid jingle of her car keys hitting the floor. Then the screaming starts, from both of them, and I think: How did I end up with this Jerry Springer drama at home? With this telenovela shit? I am not religious, but once, when I was riding bikes with friends, one of my Mormon neighbors told me that in her church they believe we all choose our families. That before we were born, God let us choose our gender and our mother and father, too.
“Wow, God is a fucking idiot then,” I’d said.
My Mormon neighbor isn’t allowed to be around me anymore.
Dirty Thirty by Shanna Merceron | Cleaver Magazine, September 2020
My girl was looking at me. It only makes sense that she was looking at me because I’d been looking at her for so long, watching her socks and her nipples and her ocean skin. I met her gaze and her expression was interested but disinterested and I did my best to look the same. I was curious about her, about the place, about what kind of women came here. I kept staring at her. I learned that if you look away too soon, it means that the gaze meant something to you. I didn’t want this gaze to mean anything.
Bread and Circuses by Samantha Liu | The Lumiere Review, September 2020
The worst part of anyone’s day was always the kidnappings. But they happened quietly and discretely enough that nobody really cared much for them.
Curated by Cole Meyer