When I first started dating Damien, he told me that everything I knew about cancer was wrong. I had just survived a bout and it had been wrong. I was young, not very young, but healthy. I did yoga regularly and tended to my core with fitness videos I found on the internet. I drank fresh juice. Not knowing what came next was the wrongest part of all. So many holes opened up inside of me while I waited for the illness to go away, and when I got no answers the holes just filled with cancer. The ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
Read the Winners of the 2022 Insider Prize
Lauren Hough may be known for her spar-ready online presence, but in real life she’s pure warmth: years ago, she overheard us talking about the Insider Prize—American Short Fiction’s annual contest for incarcerated writers—at a coffee shop in Austin, and she walked up, and proclaimed, “I want to help!” So we asked her to be the judge. This year’s submissions capture the uncertainty, loss, and despair so many of us have experienced in the past two years. But they also capture self-reflection, ... [READ MORE]
Bodies of Water
6:32 a.m. There is an agitation in the Morgans’ swimming pool. The water becomes abruptly more aware, as if nudged from drowsing. The September sun is edging over the horizon. A flurry of crows crosses the brightening sky. Their squabbling rings out in the morning quiet of this Palm Springs suburb. The ripples in the pool abate quickly. There isn’t a breath of wind yet, and the pump remains off at this hour. The water lies inert, held down by gravity, walled in by layers of concrete. ... [READ MORE]
A Random Strike
I hated my job at the bowling alley more than usual that day. The Maximum Lilac deodorizer had run dry. I was too busy renting out shoes to slap an out-of-order sign on Mission Impossible, which left me with a list of token refunds a mile long. My period was nine days late. Some adults nearby were talking about the war in Ukraine while their children tried to bowl with two hands. “Five bucks a gallon,” this bald dad guy said, then slugged beer. “And it’s not even our situation.” They were as ... [READ MORE]
Our Family Fortune-Teller
The sign in my window says “Card Reader.” It is small, fuzzy, and lit up in a shade of 1960s pawnshop neon that implies my lack of card-reading expertise as well as a dwindling interest in the so-called future of my business. Still, people knock on my door and come inside. And come back. And ask me for the kind of giveaway they receive at espresso drive-throughs: one free session for every ten. Nothing, it seems, is more trustworthy than irrelevance. Except to a landlord. Today, mine is ... [READ MORE]
Down There
One summer night in 2030, in the garden of a nursing home, two old men began remembering. As a little boy I thought that dried apricots were ears, and I’d wonder who the unlucky soul was who’d had them chopped off. When I was forced to try one, picking it out from a Christmas arrangement of dates and candied fruit, I said to myself: “So this is what ears taste like.” I, on the other hand, believed in a magic powder that, if dissolved in water and drunk, would protect me from bad dreams—and ... [READ MORE]