Mumma’s hair could be found everywhere except on her head. She had alopecia. Then came the cancer. But she also had me and my sister. “Just one after another,” she’d say about her diseases. But also, about her daughters, Rania in the womb while I was on her breast. Her flossy strands showed up all …
Deesha Philyaw‘s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, …
This was back in 2010 when I was working as an assistant at Balaskas Bros Wound Care. The sign said Balaskas Bros, but I never met any brothers. As far as I knew there was just Iannis Balaskas, who went by Bob, a Greek immigrant from Athens with pig eyes and a snub nose like …
The Thompson kids’ dad sold the black walnut trees behind their house for timber and now clusters of big sad stumps spoiled the backyard. Tess was living with and caring for the kids—ten-year-old Miles and eight-year-old Minnie—while the Thompson mom recovered in some facility for broken-down women and the Thompson dad drove a long-haul truck …
My father’s first wife had died giving birth to Utaka, the youngest of my three older brothers. She had done her duty, my father often joked, giving him an abundance of sons. Therefore he could afford to be less stringent when it came to selecting his next wife. He had settled for Hanako, the mother …
Jules stepped through the wall, into the old, flat world of the painting. “Madam?” The guard poked her head from the real world into this one. “Would you like me to take your picture?” One end of the gallery was a gilt-framed proscenium. Behind it was a replica of an old Dutch kitchen with a …