Short Stories

Something is wrong. There is a stranger in the back of the train. Someone I have never seen before. Sitting alone, among all the daily commuters I see every day. Perhaps I never noticed him before. Though he has a distinct look I would have noticed.

At dusk, he carried a small backpack into the park, unfurled a one-man pop-up tent near the ablutions of the main camping ground. The tent screamed vivid yellows and blues—jarringly incongruent with his craggy face and deadpan expression.

Caroline nearly misses it. She would’ve missed it if it weren’t for the snow-blind blankness of her new bed set. The spot is perfectly round and rust red, the planet Mars in miniature. “The god of war,” she thinks, a bad omen.

In the far stretches of Taraba State, where the savannah breathes in long sighs and the earth blushes red beneath bare feet, there lies a land shaped more by stories than by time. The wind there is not just wind.

Emily remembered long ago when her parents found her in the backyard as a child, knees in the mud, digging in the dirt with her bare hands. She looked up at them as they loomed over her…

It could be a shed for livestock, or farm equipment; anything except kitchen supplies. The dark green paint job looks fresh, trying to blend into landscape; an attempt to appear inconspicuous. Eyes of greasy men watch from across the road, cigarettes dangling from their bearded mouths.

Our high school rose above Istanbul like a mausoleum, and its corridors steeped in mildew and silence.

The front door slams downstairs. If I hear whistling, it’s dad. If not, it’s her. I count my heartbeats in my throat. The sun has started its slow descent.