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 Rickey Fayne, reflecting on the experience of writing this story: I began the story that became “Spare the Rod” as an assignment for a workshop led by Maya Perez (whose amazing story also appears in Issue 72). When I sat down to … [Read more...] about Spare the Rod
death
Father as Astronaut
My first assignment was an infestation: albino deer flocking in townspeople's yards, grazing away what little greenery was left. I concocted a spray, biodegradable and harmless to plants but noxious to animals. The herd scattered like skeleton teeth in the foothills and starved. More recently, I was assigned to a village that had seen the face of God, every villager among them, which was why they were losing teeth and hair, why their bones had turned to meringue. His Divine Light had cut … [Read more...] about Father as Astronaut
Editorial Outtakes: Cutter Wood
Editorial Outtakes is a series in which we publish excerpts from recent books that you won’t find anywhere else because, prior publication, these sections were cut. This installment of Editorial Outtakes features a scene from Cutter Wood's Love and Death in the Sunshine State: The Story of a Crime, an account the 2008 murder of Sabine Musil-Buehler. Wood's investigation is augmented by a more personal story about the nature of love and intimacy. What results is a deeply moving work of true … [Read more...] about Editorial Outtakes: Cutter Wood
Choose Your Own
Section A You are sitting in the bedroom of a house that is inches away from the freeway. Cars whiz past at an alarming rate, and it seems to you that a minor slip of the steering wheel will send a car crashing into the bedroom, killing the occupants of the house. You are there on a date with the man who lives there, a man named Oswald. He complains that the highway was built too close to his house, taking away his front yard—you see the tiny blades of grass that are left of it, so few … [Read more...] about Choose Your Own
The Mother’s Portion
https://soundcloud.com/americanshortfiction/suzanne-morrison-the-mothers-portion The gravedigger was a woman. Tall, broad-shouldered, her cheeks flushed red from the cold. Or from shame. She hadn’t done the job we’d hired her to do: dig our mother’s grave. Father David, the priest from Gibraltar who looked and spoke like Michael Caine, had told her and the groundskeeper that the family would not be leaving until our dead was in the ground. It didn’t matter if the hole she had dug couldn’t … [Read more...] about The Mother’s Portion
Three
We deeply regret to report that the author of our October Web Exclusive, Ihab Hassan, passed away shortly after we accepted his work for publication. It is with our humblest gratitude to his family that we present his three short pieces here. We hope you find them, as we did, breathtaking moments, rendered with artful precision, that linger long in the memory. On October 15, we will be publishing an interview with one of his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where Hassan was … [Read more...] about Three