There’s a cemetery on a mountainside in Kabul that’s running out of space. I read a New York Times piece about it years ago. A group of boys run grave maintenance, for a price, and one girl, six years old, works the mountainside with them. She brags like the boys about taking in mourners—too young to appreciate how much we mourners want to be taken in. She brags about what her father in Iran will bring her when he returns home. She prays for a Galaxy phone. I still think about her prayers and ... [READ MORE]
NOTEBOOK
2021 American Short(er) Fiction Prize
Please Note: The 2021 Short(er) Fiction Prize is now closed for submissions. *We're extending the deadline until February 15, 2021! Good Luck!* We are thrilled to announce that Susan Steinberg, author of three remarkable story collections—The End of Free Love, Hydroplane, and Spectacle—and Machine: A Novel (read a beautiful ASF-published excerpt, "Killers," here), will judge our 2021 American Short(er) Fiction Prize. The prize recognizes extraordinary short fiction under 1,000 words. The ... [READ MORE]
Bread Week
1. Your father calls you train wreck, as in, HEY, wake up, train wreck, bud, you’re falling asleep—beady, bootblack eyes narrowed on you from the Hemingway chair in the basement. Your mother is memorizing two-letter words, your baby boy squeezing the dog’s fur, and gentle, gentle, your wife is saying, practice gentle on the giraffe. I don’t very well like the taste of rubber, says Paul Hollywood––suaven, yeasty fellow in a collar on TV. Your son likes rubber. Rubber rings––Rings of ... [READ MORE]
Cat’s-Eye
At night I oil the door, whose hinges have been squeaking all year, and in the morning when I open it, they’re quiet. The rest is the same. I don’t wake anyone. The cat follows me into the bathroom. After I sit down, he jumps onto my lap, which is half-fleece, half-skin. Each paw, cold as a child’s nose, lands at a slightly different moment. He circles for a few beats, presses his paws into the tops of my thighs, an action that wakes and soothes me. Within seconds, his paws are warm. They ... [READ MORE]
Ember
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]
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]