She didn’t belong here. Clean, classy, swaying like she was caught between two worlds. Her eyes? Lost, Frozen-Ice. The bike man’s hand dangled too close to her breast. His smirk dared me to care. “How much?” I asked, throwing cash at him. She [...]

I mistakenly invited a gust of wind into my room. It caught up my blank sheets of paper and scattered them across the room. I didn’t blame the sheets. Had any of them had as much as a dot, maybe they would have been heavier. I sighed and picked [...]

I leaned on the sagging breasts of my mother, while she rambled the long laces of my dark, thick hair. Her shining face, reflected the bewitching nature of the sun. After a while, being satisfied from inhaling the heat, the fragrance of her [...]

My ears followed the noise of those children playing hide and seek under the moonlight. Staring through the window, I saw them running and looking for concealment before their seeker finished the count. I wanted to put an end to it, but my words [...]

It’s now a weekly cycle for Mama to adorn me with invectives. That became her new way of addressing my mistakes since the day she saw me with Francis down our street. Mama wasn’t wrong for her actions that day, including the slaps I enjoyed, [...]

I stand at the edge of the airport, the constant hum of suitcase wheels and the chatter of travelers filling the air. Another oversized bag in my hands, I heave it onto the conveyor belt. I know these bags like I know their owners, they are [...]

His death chilled me to the bones. Was it the compact layers or the spongy layers of my bones? I couldn’t discern. Not because I do not want to, but because I chose not to. My father, as a teenager, meticulously warned me about boys, but he was [...]

That week was abnormal in many ways. For one, the sun feared opening its eyes; any time it tried to peep, fog forced it back. One could not tell whether the fog was man-made or natural. For another, it appeared to squeeze life out of beings. The [...]

The early morning sky brooded at 3am and Ojotule’s heart was a beehive of activities. For 30 years, she had wallowed in confusion, anger, and now a deep-seated sadness; weariness that nothing could shift. As Ojotule approached her destination, [...]

Her life was a series of shadows, each one cast by a regret too deep to forget. The mistake she made years ago clung to her like a relentless specter, whispering in her ear, draining the color from her days. Then, one morning, she noticed a red [...]

It crashed on its back, its legs up and wriggling. I found myself envious of its natural voluptuous gaster—my body was eager to fill out in the right places—as it twisted its thin waist this way and that way, struggling to get back on its feet. [...]

It is day three hundred and sixty-five of being a thing that hurts in the life of the one person I love. Fernando Pessoa was right when he said: the inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart. My existence is contradictory against nature, [...]