The first time I saw Lake I was sitting on the bench between sets, waiting for the burn in my chest to subside. She walked past me to the big cage and slung her duffel to the floor. I watched with idle interest as she wrapped her wrists with soft black straps and wrangled her hair into a high loop. Her rose-colored Alphaletes came up well above her hips, and she wore a long-sleeved crop top that announced in block letters
NO TIME FOR RATS.
NO TIME FOR SNAKES.
Dead Man’s Association meets every Wednesday evening at Padiyappa’s Tea Stall & Smoke Shop. I am the president and the primary focus of the club. There is only one table at Padiyappa’s, but at 6:00 p.m. on Wednesdays, no local would dare take my spot. It’s been this way for the past fifteen years. The tea stall boy, a new chap, hands us stainless steel tumblers of piping hot tea and then hangs around to stare at me.
“Po da,” I say to him, eyeing his hairless chest, visible because his top two buttons are not fastened. “This is not a circus. Let me be.”
When Nayana came out of the garbing room, Noah forgot all about the pinworms. He forgot about the perianal tape test he’d just done on the sentinel mouse in Room 8, and he forgot about the disinfecting he’d have to do for the rest of the week. He forgot about the yellow paper gown, elastic hair bonnet, and rubber gloves he was wearing. He knew only the ray of Nayana’s smile, her scent of lemon and ginger.
“There’s a pinworm issue in Room 8,” he said, floating down the hall behind her. “But don’t worry—your mouseys are fine.”
Excerpted from Fairfield County
When asked what number Pal O Mine should run under, Moses had said, “Number seven or number three. Them’s divine numbers, alright. God made this whole world in seven days. And He’s a trinity: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Cain’t go wrong with three neither.”
It wasn’t often that a Negro at the racetrack was asked his opinion such as this, but Moses was respected by the horse’s owner, so when it came time to prepare for the 1938 Carolina Jessamine Invitational, Mrs. Pynchon-Grant went right up to Moses and told him to pick the number.
The number seven would have put the stallion too far right of the field and closer to the stands of crowds, and so would have caused further distraction that would have leaked through Pal’s blinders and earplugs. That far out in the field and the thunder of the spectator’s cheers would drown out the footfalls of Pal’s competitors, and so the number three would put the colt closer to the center of action and increase the odds of victory—should he be able to run.
The dog is crossing a circle. Dawn light catching silver strands on a gray coat, saliva on a panting tongue, a red collar. A lost dog.
For an instant, we lock eyes, then I continue around and take the north exit. I’m in a hurry to get to the meet-up point. My first time running with others and I’m dreading it, but doctor’s orders and all that. Besides, I’ve promised my husband. I will be late, I will be late, I will be late, I say through my teeth, then pull over to look for the dog.
Reggie pulled his truck up the driveway and past the old goat pasture, a field of knee-high brome that now fed only a rusted tractor, not a buck or a nanny in sight. The only good thing about his wife’s death all those years ago—he could finally let go of the shaggy herd she had loved so much, fill the freezer, and focus on the more agreeable ruminants.
Reggie killed the ignition next to the house. One coal-colored cloud floated like a top hat above his yellow lopsided rancher. Past that, the afternoon sun painted the foothills a fiery mauve. In the distance a trio of bluffs gave way to an abstract canvas, just cattle and rust-red desert smudging south to New Mexico and on into the Navajo Nation.
By LIZ DEWOLF
The buzzer rattles the empty room. Nearly empty—there’s the bed behind the wooden screen, the couch where Laurel sits in her underwear. Since Arda’s text that afternoon, she’s waited restlessly for him to arrive, imagining his route from where she lived with him on the Asian side of Istanbul to her new apartment on the European side: the narrow streets down to the ferry station, the boat churning through silver water, the near-vertical climb to her sixth-floor walkup in Beyoğlu. She presses the button that unlocks the building’s entrance and decides not to get dressed.
Arda enters her apartment without knocking. “Mutlu yıllar,” he says, though it’s now several weeks into 2013. For the first time since Laurel’s lived in Turkey, they didn’t celebrate the New Year together.
By THOMAS EMPL
Translated by ISABEL FARGO COLE
The ferryman wrenched the gangplank out of its mount, heaved a breath and hooked it between the boat and the dock. During the brief ride we didn’t say a word; he didn’t recognize us. On the coast, to the east of the town, a military jet took off and dipped straight into a breakneck loop to head the other way, trailing its sonic boom.
I’d shaved the night before. Mouth open, I fingered my smooth skin. Rough lines ran from my nostrils to the corners of my mouth, like incisions. My ears looked huge. When I got up in the morning, my mirror image startled me. It was as if someone had hung up one of those photos I never looked at, showing that out-of-place apprentice, expressionless at the joiner’s bench. I didn’t recognize myself until I heard my voice.
This story is reprinted in honor of Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival, which features Jamaica Kincaid as a guest author. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.
Image courtesy of the author.
The dress I am wearing in this black-and-white photograph, taken when I was two years old, is a yellow dress made of cotton poplin (a fabric with a slightly un-smooth texture first manufactured in the French town of Avignon and brought to England by the Huguenots, but I could not have known that at the time), and it was made for me by my mother. This shade of yellow, the color of my dress that I was wearing when I was two years old, was the same shade of yellow as boiled cornmeal, a food that my mother was always eager for me to eat in one form (as a porridge) or another (as fongie, the starchy part of my midday meal) because it was cheap and therefore easily available (but I did not know that at the time), and because she thought that foods bearing the colors yellow, green, or orange were particularly rich in vitamins and so boiled cornmeal would be particularly good for me. But I was then (not so now) extremely particular about what I would eat, not knowing then (but I do now) of shortages and abundance, having no consciousness of the idea of rich and poor (but I know now that we were poor then), and would eat only boiled beef (which I required my mother to chew for me first and, after she had made it soft, remove it from her mouth and place it in mine), certain kinds of boiled fish (doctor or angel), hard-boiled eggs (from hens, not ducks), poached calf’s liver and the milk from cows, and so would not even look at the boiled cornmeal (porridge or fongie). There was not one single thing that I could isolate and say I did not like about the boiled cornmeal (porridge or fongie) because I could not isolate parts of things then (though I can and do now), but whenever I saw this bowl of trembling yellow substance before me I would grow still and silent, I did not cry, that did not make me cry.
By NALINI JONES
This piece is excerpted from the novel The Unbroken Coast by Nalini Jones, a guest at Amherst College’s eleventh annual literary festival. Register and see the full list of LitFest 2026 events here.
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