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]
NOTEBOOK
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]
Goodwill
Let’s say you work in a candy factory cleaning the chocolate vats, and the job is dull, but you’re like, It’s necessary so the kids can be safe. Except then you read an article about how your boss’s boss basically puts cocaine in the chocolate bars that makes kids go insane with lust and craving for more of their product. — So you quit and get a loan to go to school and work for an NGO that builds solar drinking wells, and yeah it’s dull and mostly filing forms—no use for a brain, or that ... [READ MORE]
Pioneers
ASF is recognizing Black History Month by sharing, for the first time online, four stories from our Winter 2020 issue, which showcased emerging Black writers selected by guest editor and PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize winner Danielle Evans. Here is author Maya Perez, reflecting on the experience of writing this story: My initial idea for the story was two people with a shared history having a reunion and realizing that while they don’t know each other at all, they share an overwhelming ... [READ MORE]