Fiction

Hyena Boys

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

The hyena boys came to Bonaventure, which was serendipitous, because he was used to avoiding the world before the world spurned him. For one, his white albino skin flecked with dark spots made him a regular target of mockery. When Bonaventure was younger and his father was around and could barely afford to send him to school, his peers often taunted him to come outside in the midday heat. They dared him to come to the playground without squinting, one palm raised to block stray sunlight. They likened him to a pillar of butter melting in the sun. They asked if he was a vampire banished to the shadows.

Laila

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

By ALLYSON NOMAN

Things have taken a strange turn since my husband uprooted our family. First I quit my job. Then I stopped eating. And now I’ve begun to receive messages from the dead.

Four months ago, we moved from rural, pastoral Northern California, a place I loved, to southwest Virginia. Over the summer, smoke from the West Coast wildfires has followed us, traveling east across the country, shrouding the Blue Ridge Mountains in a haze made heavier by humidity. I like to look out the window, air purifiers humming behind me, and watch the microscopic remnants of home suspended in air, thinking they’ve been sent here just for me.

The Department of Home Economics

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

By HANNAH GERSEN

On a rainy morning in late August last year, I stood beneath a wedding-sized tent to observe the Sixth Opening Convocation of the West Virginia School of Home Economics. It was a humid day, and the smell of wet, freshly cut grass mingled with the perfumes of the young women who surrounded me. I was a guest of Sophia Chafin, keynote alumna speaker. She sat on a small wooden stage with her six-year-old daughter, Riley; her two-year-old son, Taylor Jr.; and her husband, Representative Taylor Chafin. Sophia, clad in a floral dress, held Taylor’s hand as the school’s co-founder, Andrea Armstrong, introduced her, describing her as “one of WVSHE’s greatest success stories.”

Good Little Fox

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

By KAROLINA LETUNOVA

It’s minus forty outside, and on Baba Lena’s glassed-in balcony the towels have dried stiff and I stand them up on the couch like snow cranes flying north and breathe in their frozen freshness. On a warm winter day of minus twenty Celsius, we could go buy ice cream. Rita wanted to come to Baba Lena’s too, but she is in the hospital. When we have a cold, mama makes us breathe hot steam from boiled potatoes, but Rita leaned too close and scalded her throat and her voice is gone and it hurts so much she can’t even swallow.

I would happily trade places with her if I could have Aleksey as my best friend.

Wild Aster

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

By ANNA HOGELAND

1910

Ida Smith lived on a large farm near the south shore of Lake Erie, a lake she believed was the ocean when she was very young, because the shore was sand and all she could see was water and water and she didn’t yet know the sea smelled like salt.

Guava Paste

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

By DAVID SERAFINO

Gustavo’s cinder block bungalow has no windows, so he’s surprised when he steps out at half past dawn to find a man in an olive uniform digging post holes for a semi-assembled fence scattered in the dusty yard. The soldier stands, puffs his chest, and dusts off his brass buttons. He is young, tall, and handsome—some proud mother’s son. Gustavo is old, bent, and ugly as the day he was born.

This is How it Begins

October 26, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

By ELVIS BEGO

Brunch nearly over, talk getting punctuated by lulls, her mother, trim and elegant in her pastel widowhood, letting father go so easily, it seems to Josephine, now asks her if she is thinking about a child.

“No,” comes the answer, but too quick, too reflexive. It’s too late to take it back, but she makes the attempt anyway, and says, “Well, it occurs to me now and then, but Ismar, you know….” She doesn’t finish the sentence, and her mother knows to look away to give her time to change the subject, which she doesn’t. Instead she says, “I will, of course, have to think about it, if it is ever to happen.”

The Messengers

October 1, 2026 Fiction, Translation

By ZHU YUE
Translated by ALYSSA ASQUITH and JIANAN QIAN

Story appears below in English and the original Chinese.

Translator’s Note:
Zhu Yue’s characters often find themselves disembodied: their eyes fly away; their teeth fall out; their bodily secretions are preserved in museums; their fingers are replaced with wheat noodles; they find their own heads buried in their backyards.

Holding On is Forever

September 10, 2026 Fiction, Issue 32, Issue 32 Fiction

By MINDY MISENER

Excerpted from Good Guys, out October 13 from Melville House.

Chupacabra

September 3, 2026 Fiction, Translation

By RODRIGO URQUIOLA FLORES
Translated by SHAINA BRASSARD

Story appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note
It is a pleasure to share my translation of this short story from contemporary Bolivian author Rodrigo Urquiola Flores. This semi-autobiographical work of fiction transports the reader to the windswept edges of the city of La Paz during the early and mid-1990s, when young children like the author and myself were cognizant of the mysterious and feared chupacabra as a topic of conversation and media coverage.

The story is part cataloging of the author’s first significant experiences and memories. Thrillingly, the narrator takes us on a journey from the neglect and loneliness of his spare, dusty home to the high drama of the soccer stadium. It is nothing short of a revelation. In this third space, he finds seemingly all the raw materials of life: effort, teamwork, luck, heartbreak, agony, triumph, relief.

Through the storytelling of his Aymara grandmother, Urquiola also takes us back in time to the Ocobaya hacienda, a site of subjugation and domination. I have resisted translating – and therefore decontextualizing – pongo, patrón, and amo, the unique terms of racialized power associated with this social and economic system. Curious readers are invited to learn more about haciendas, a significant feature of not-so-distant Latin American history with meaningful connections to the plantation system of the United States.

Hyena Boys

Laila

The Department of Home Economics

Good Little Fox

Wild Aster

Guava Paste

This is How it Begins

The Messengers

Holding On is Forever

Chupacabra

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