American Short Fiction · Ember by Pascha Sotolongo Chuchi marvels at the sparks brightening this darkest night, and I guess they are kind of pretty. You look up, let your eyes water against the cold, and can’t tell the embers from the stars. We don’t have a tree this year, so maybe smoldering flakes of the Brownsburg Public Library are as close to Christmas lights as we’re gonna get. Chuchi tilts his head all the way back, mouth open, and the orangey glow illuminates his features. Little swirls ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
New Folktale About Myself
I’m sweeping the floors one morning when I notice a gouge in the wood like a fingermark in cake icing. I cover it back up with the rug and resolve to sand it down, but a few days later I see that the hole has widened, deepened. Now I can run two fingers through it. What’s more, it’s soft around the edges, wet to the touch. Hunched over it on my knees, I feel as if I’m intruding on something, the embarrassment of watching an animal give birth, and so I cover it up again, avoid it for days, even ... [READ MORE]
The Invisible String
In our bathroom, there’s a worn 3x5 notecard taped to the mirror that reads, “There’s an invisible string connecting me to you.” When my daughter, Hope, was five, we moved from Northern California to Austin, Texas because I had a new job as Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the community college. This isn’t a small distance to cover with a tiny person, so my husband and I asked his parents to help. They flew from Maryland to collect Hope. We were immensely grateful, but we were also ... [READ MORE]
Swan of the Gods
Back in college, I unwisely took an introduction to astronomy class hoping I’d learn something mystical about the formation of stars, how they came to be named, even what secrets they could tell me about my future. The class, however, was much more interested in teaching us how to quantify the universe. It wanted to transform the time it takes to sigh into a unit and shrink the interstellar medium of planets into something like grams, but grams in terms of planets, as determined by a variety of ... [READ MORE]
The Very Last Time I Set Out to Stargaze
I’m in Joshua Tree, California, the very last time I set out to stargaze. I’ve come for the month of July to this hallucinogenic desertscape inland of Los Angeles, where my goal is to disconnect from daily life. Oneness with the universe and all that. As a debut author, I’ve been spooked by too much attention, and so I look up and think about how good it is to disappear into these constellations, so far from human concerns. This is one of the last nights I see the stars in California. Two ... [READ MORE]
The North
My uncle was driving us north, where the enemy planes hadn’t yet attacked. He took turns drinking from a bottle with the man sitting up front. My parents and I were squeezed in the back. My mother closed her eyes and held me close. My father kept biting his lips. “Drink up,” my uncle said, passing the bottle to my father. My father returned the bottle untouched. Everybody else we knew had already left the city. My uncle was the only person still in town with a car. I didn’t know why we ... [READ MORE]