Danielle had heard that the girl Nadine was prone to fainting spells. She didn’t understand until an incident occurred in her own class, while she was teaching a grammar lesson and trying to corral the attention of sixteen eighth graders with a game. She stood before a green chalkboard, in a dark room with yellow walls and three dusty windows. The room was way too small and smelled perpetually of sweat and fruity body spray. When she looked at her students, she felt a strain of despair well known to most middle school educators. An existential awareness, coupled with acute embarrassment for the part of herself that continued to speak despite a deeply disinterested audience.
Danielle called on everyone. That was her rule. This was the English Academy after all. Their parents accepted elevated school fees so that unqualified and unpaid Americans like her could teach their children Standard American English. Nadine had been asked to identify the appropriate preposition to describe the location of Danielle’s two-liter water bottle.
The rest of the class fidgeted, passing indiscreet notes in their books. Danielle kept her eyes on the girl who avoided her gaze. Nadine pulled at the damp collar of her white polo. She bit her lip, wiped at her nose. Danielle was about to offer a clue when Nadine launched her arms in the air with a scream and tipped sideways out of her chair like a fallen ice cream scoop.
Danielle stood frozen at the chalkboard while the other girls scrambled toward Nadine.
“Get Mr. Mesidor!” someone called. Several students ran out, their sneakers clopping against dirt like a warning brigade.
Nadine’s eyes were sealed shut at the lashes. Her hands were tight fists, her arms were still locked over her head. Dust bunnies stuck to Nadine’s cornrows and her shirt rode up from the elastic waistband where it had been tucked. The girls adjusted their classmate’s clothes, picked the lint from her hair, and tried as hard as they could to pry her hands open.
Danielle looked on, rolling a soft piece of chalk between sweating fingers.
“It happens all the time, Miss,” said one of the girls. “Djab,” she added.
Mr. Mesidor, the math teacher, arrived just as the girls had finally opened Nadine’s palms. He walked with the self-importance of a man called for a specialty job. He rolled up his sleeves, knelt to the ground, and placed a hand on the girl’s forehead.
“Nadine, get up!” he said.
With just as much gusto as her body had fallen, the girl’s eyes sprang open with the glassy stare of a baby doll. She breathed heavily. Mr. Mesidor shooed the rest of the students out. He helped the girl up and sat with her on a bench.
Danielle followed her students outside, where they finished the class hour playing football in the dirt yard. There was no way she could recover a lesson after such theatrics. Danielle stood in the open door of the administration office where she could both watch the children and talk to the school secretary.
“Should we call somebody?” she asked.
“Her father’s coming. This is the fourth time.” The secretary loaded a ream of paper in the printer. She pressed the unlit button on the front of the machine and sucked her teeth. “No power.”
“Is she sick?” said Danielle.
“They think it’s a spiritual attack,” said the secretary.
“What?” Danielle crossed her arms.
“Jealousy. There’s a family dispute over land.”
She waited for a cue. A wink or a smirk or something. The secretary said nothing, just scribbled on a clipboard. Having seen the episode now for herself, Danielle was also skeptical about the “fainting spells.” Yet, she wouldn’t go so far as to call them supernatural.
After dismissal Danielle sat in the school library wiping dusty books with a rag. She’d been tasked to reassemble the sizeable English selection after it had been dismantled and moved into a new room. The people in charge of the move were inconsiderate enough to mix all the books up in the process.
“Is there a system or something?” Danielle had asked the principal, a Haitian American from Boston who had founded the school in her mother’s honor.
“There’s a binder somewhere,” the principal said, running a hand over her shaved head. “Cara used to do all this stuff.”
Cara, the legend, had come from Maryland, stayed five years at the school, married a local, adopted a kid, and carried them both back to America. She had been very efficient, and in her absence, the administration’s precarious organization had quickly fallen into deep disorder.
Danielle had come across the principal’s desperate recruitment ad while scouring volunteer sites for opportunities in Haiti. She was on her own journey to reconnect with the radical liberation energy of her ancestral lands. Volunteering and teaching were bonus points for her resume when she eventually applied to grad school. When she landed in Jacmel, she found the principal juggling a bigger mess than was advertised.
The building was in a constant process of half-finished repairs. The principal was hardly available, often delegating executive tasks to the secretary or Danielle. There was inconsistent light and water, inconsistent parents who asked for credit and payment extensions. Inconsistent staff who arrived late and unprepared. Inconsistent government with a revolving door of embezzlers.
The other English-speaking staff-member was her roommate Kelly, whose main function was to prop up their charade and convince parents that their children were indeed receiving a bilingual education. Kelly taught Bible Lessons, Kindergarten and First Grade English. Kelly posted pictures of mountains and captioned them with scriptures. Kelly was having the gap year of her white upper middle class evangelical life. Meanwhile Danielle taught English, translated documents, ran admin trainings, and sent e-mails to overseas donors. All of this in addition to managing the library.
Despite the tedium of the task, she liked the safe seclusion of the library and having her own space to control. She tried her best to maintain some sense of order, even implementing a no shoe policy to keep the story-time rugs clean. She felt a queer comfort in the room full of English words, a sort of fitting in that still somehow separated her from everybody else.
Danielle’s eyebrows were fuzzy, legs and armpits unshaved, which was common for women in Haiti but would have marked her a lesbian back in Bronxville. She also wore a gold chain on her ankle, which marked her a lesbian in Haiti but was common in Bronxville. She feigned ignorance wherever she was, whenever anybody asked her why she appeared the way she did. One of the French teachers was always suggesting that she cut her hair, which was styled in locs that she’d been growing for five years. Another came to school with a bag of secondhand dresses, several sizes too large, as a gift.
Where are you from? Do you have children? Are you married? was the regular line of interrogation from strangers and taxi drivers. In the close-knit community of her missionary funded school: Are you a Christian? Often asked with deadpan eyes, always followed with why not?
It didn’t matter how she replied, her WhatsApp inbox would still swell with evangelical blessings from well-meaning acquaintances. She never confessed, but she had a mild interest in vodou, especially for its liberative potential. It was a vodou ceremony that sparked the Haitian struggle for colonial independence in 1791. Vodou was revolution, spirituality, and freedom, all braided into a religion her mother swore was evil. Danielle had been baptized Catholic, raised on smoky incense, forehead ashes, and crackers laid on the waiting tongue. She’d done her catechism and taken St. Theresa as patron, but in Haiti she walked past vodou temples with pictures of saints painted on the front doors. She saw multicolored candles for sale in convenience boutiques next to pocket sized editions of the four gospels.
Some Friday nights, after the weekly devotional the principal and her husband held at the school, Danielle heard drumming from the other side of the compound wall. The moon would be in the sky, the neighbors singing songs that she couldn’t understand. Right next door to the Christian English Academy.
Danielle thought again about Nadine’s little spell, and the way Mesidor had walked in, put a hand to the child, and called her forth from her dormant state like a New Testament prophet. And then, like the devil himself, Mesidor appeared in the library’s doorway, as if plucked from Danielle’s reverie.
Before she could even say hello, he was across the rug and standing at a set of shelves, inspecting the spines of several encyclopedias. Then he moved to the Bible shelf, which was filled with all manner of good books, in English, French, and Kreyol. One of the tomes tumbled to the floor. He looked up, and Danielle’s eyes stuck to him like a fly swat.
“Do you need something?” she asked.
“I’m looking for an Algebra book,” he said. “The secretary mentioned it might be here.”
“The math books are in the box behind you. And please take your shoes off when you are in the library.”
“Sorry!” he said looking down at his shoes. He even smiled like a bashful child. He backed away towards the door and knocked over another stack of books on the floor.
Danielle watched Mr. Mesidor scramble. He had brown eyes, skin like clay, and hair shaped in a cut that aged him past his 30 years. He wore a checkered shirt and brown old man shoes. He was practical, like most educators, respectfully and appropriately dressed for the workplace. She was practical in her own way, too. She wore tanks and shorts because it was fucking hot. Her locs were piled on her head, and she kept a rechargeable fan at hand for days without electricity.
Mesidor stood up, patting his palms on loose trousers.
“How is Nadine?” Danielle asked him.
She almost regretted showing interest in his opinion, which would invite future interactions. But she was curious.
“She’s fine for now, gras a dye. She’s a sensitive girl,” he said.
“What’s wrong with her?” Danielle asked.
His eyes brightened. He seemed earnest.
“It’s a mystical matter,” he said. “A very serious thing.”
Danielle did not pursue the topic. She returned to her dusting. Mesidor found his book hiding in the English Algebra box. Shortly after he left the library, Danielle said a cynical prayer for the girl. The next day, Nadine was absent from school.
In Danielle’s experience, the average man could sense when a woman despised him, the same way he could perceive desperation, or smell the possibility of sexual contact. Danielle already had a reputation—she’d spoken gruffly to the groundskeeper for repeatedly forgetting to sweep her library.
“I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said.
“It’s still your job to clean it,” she answered.
She also made an enemy out of a bus driver who always blocked traffic during morning drop-off. The men especially never responded well to her opinions, even the most benign. They expected her to be nice like Kelly and took offense when she was direct and nonsense-intolerant. Sure, her tongue was lou, she had an accent and a funny way of piecing phrases together. But she got her ideas across.
“What did you say, blan?” the bus driver had shouted when she told him off for the third time. It was a blatant dismissal of her request, on the grounds of her otherness. She shouted back at him that he ought to clean his ears and was promptly removed from drop-off duty. She didn’t mind having less work to do, but felt embarrassed by her explosive reaction, and further shame when she received no defense or support from her colleagues.
This was the blan school, where kids learned how to talk like blan, but somehow, blan was a word that could shame her, and this upset her more than anything. She was foreign enough to be ignorant of the culture, to be assailed with vulgar catcalls, to be swindled in markets, dismissed at her place of work. But she was not foreign enough to be exempt from cultural norms the way that Kelly could be. Kelly with her blonde hair and midwestern Kreyol. Kelly with her smiles and her Jesus Loves Me tank tops. It didn’t matter if Kelly belonged because she so obviously did not. But Danielle was stuck somewhere else. She was too inside and too outside. Too in-between.
It was upon this realization that she began to retreat, steering clear from confrontation, from men, and from people in general. Mr. Mesidor, however, seemed oblivious to Danielle’s new posture. He kept coming into her space unannounced.
“This used to be my classroom,” he said, one afternoon while she was arranging books on animal science. His socked feet were two offensive brown lumps on her reading rug. Every day he feigned interest in some shelf that she had recently arranged, asking questions that she answered out of politesse. When she set up two desktop computers in one corner, he sat in a tiny orange chair and practiced the typing games she had installed for the fifth graders. He plucked at the keys with four hesitant fingers, and Danielle imagined the child inside him that never had a chance.
When Nadine returned two weeks later, they had moved on from prepositions to irregular verbs. It seemed that the fainting had stopped. Danielle kept an eye on the girl during class, scared that another outburst might happen, or spread to the other students somehow. She seemed okay, just quiet and a little pale. Nobody said much when Nadine came back to class. It was as if they had forgotten the episodes. As if a girl having mystical fits at school was nothing to overly think about.
At lunchtime Danielle sat on the front steps of the administration building and waited for Nadine to appear in the yard for recess. She ate an egg and smoked herring patty with her fingers. Oil dribbled down her shirt. The yard was full of screeching children playing lago, kicking balls, and hopping in and out of shapes traced in the dirt. Across the yard Danielle spotted Kelly with a gaggle of her kindergarteners. They sat in her lap and stood all around her, attempting to plait her stringy hair with their stubby five-year-old fingers. Kelly extended her phone for a selfie, and the children automatically drew closer and smiled, their cheeks sticking together as if pulled by magnets.
Danielle’s view was suddenly cut by a troop of eighth graders descending into the yard. She spotted Nadine among them, walking with her hand in Mr. Mesidor’s. Other girls followed, giggling, circling around the math teacher and asking him questions. He smiled at them. They laughed. It all looked so innocent, so out in the open.
“I need to talk to you,” Danielle said, as she walked into the principal’s open office and closed the door behind her. “I just saw Mr. Mesidor holding hands with a student.”
The principal did not lift her eyes from her phone. A pair of glasses balanced at the tip of her nose.
“Which student?” she said.
“Nadine.”
“Oh, yes. She’s been having a hard time.” The principal put down her phone. “Mesidor’s a good guy. Culturally, you know, things are different here. People have less physical boundaries.”
Danielle had noticed this. She had even seen grown men holding hands while walking or talking. Not for long, but long enough.
“You think the fainting spells were spiritual?” Danielle asked.
“Please. Her father is a menace. He spreads the same rumor about anyone he doesn’t like.”
“So why is Mesidor involved?” Danielle asked.
“I don’t know. He might be friends with her dad. But I have to pick my battles. Girl, I’ve had it up to here—” she pointed above her head, “with these builders. Besides, it’s good for our kids to have positive male role models.”
“But holding hands with teenage girls?” Danielle said. “If I confront him, he’ll take it wrong.”
The principal’s phone buzzed “You’re right. I should handle it. Thanks for keeping me aware,” she said.
She swiped a finger across her phone and answered it without a greeting.
“I gave money for ten bags of cement, what do you mean the price has gone up?”
Danielle turned to exit. The principal held the phone away from her face.
“Let’s get breakfast this Saturday. We can catch up more then,” she said.
Danielle nodded. The girls were still circling around Mr. Mesidor when she walked back to her library.
It happened quite a bit to Danielle that her mind got stuck on things that other people seemed to have already let go of. She remembered, after a long day coming back from the beach, getting down from a tap tap because of a blockade in the road. When the bus came to a halt halfway to her destination, she looked around in confusion. The woman next to her just shoved her with a hip. Danielle followed the other passengers across a line where a group of young men were holding up traffic with tree branches, rocks, and tires. Several of them brandished sticks and small bottles of rum. One of the men stood facing off with a moto driver trying to pierce the barricade. They wouldn’t let anything with an engine by. Only feet, carts, hooves, and wheelbarrows.
“A protest about gas, maybe,” an old man said. “Or electricity? This zone hasn’t gotten any in weeks.”
Even an ambulance was not allowed to pass.
The people on the bus did not waste time rubbernecking. They paid their half-fares with one driver, walked 200 meters across the blockade and climbed into a next bus on the other side. Danielle followed the other passengers, clutching her backpack close to her chest and avoiding eye contact with the men. From the back of the second bus, she watched workers in the ambulance descend with a stretcher. The body’s white shroud reflected the hot midday sun. She wanted to look away but couldn’t. She wanted to ask why. The other passengers didn’t beg for answers, they made up their own stories, gossiped about the drama. But then the bright-eyed old man started a conversation with a young mother.
“You know, women should respect men, and then men will love them. Men are supposed to water women, like flowers,” he said.
The women in the bus laughed. One impossible subject abandoned for another.
Changed subjects meant Danielle only got a quarter of every story. There were no clear answers or plots tied neatly in a bow. She hardly knew what threats to take seriously. What if one of the protesters had noticed she was American? Would they have tried to hurt her, or kidnap her, as she had heard in stories told by her mother? Would anyone defend her? If she asked questions would people be honest, or would they dismiss her as too ignorant to understand?
She knew the city well enough to know which vans would take her to the beach, and which ones would take her to town. She could feel the light tugging of intuition which guided her away from unsavory streets or from unfamiliar food carts. It was the same tug that led her to act sometimes—to help a mother replace a load on her head, or to accept schoolchildren on her lap when there were no available seats on a tap tap. She felt, some days, the sensation of belonging in small, simple ways. And though she didn’t know quite what it meant; it was this same instinctual feeling which rutted her gut and kept her fixated by Nadine.
On Saturday Danielle met the principal at Le Manoir Adriana, the famous hotel from Rene Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams. In the novel, the hotel was the home of a zombified girl, but to Danielle, it was just very charming and old. The hotel was painted white and green with ornate wooden shutters. Elegant statues and lush potted plants stood in the stone-walled lobby. A spiral staircase led to the upper rooms, and large paintings hung from the walls. Danielle’s favorite was a portrait of an old scruffy man smoking a pipe. A waitress led them through the lobby and to the dining area.
They ordered omelets on the open balcony where a breeze brushed palm fronds and made them dance. Danielle looked down into the hotel gardens. She watched one worker take clippers to neat green shrubs, and another fish mango leaves from the jewel-blue swimming pool.
Danielle enjoyed the treat of a meal on someone else’s dime. Breakfast with the principal was still work, though. Emotional labor. Danielle asked for a second coffee while the principal talked through her long list of woes.
“People depend on me for their living every month,” the principal said. She passed a hand at the back of her neck and squeezed.
“That’s big pressure,” Danielle said.
“It is. And it’s harder without help,” the principal said. “Your year is more than half-way over. How are you feeling?”
“It’s been amazing. A lot of work,” Danielle said. “I don’t know how useful I am. I’m a terrible teacher.”
“Well, you don’t know for sure. Give it another year….maybe five?” the principal said, her voice tinged with a laugh.
“I doubt it would make a difference,” Danielle said. “I’m not a great coworker either.”
“It takes time, hon. Even Cara couldn’t do what you do. And really all you can do is your best.” the principal said. “And learn to take it easy some days.”
Danielle took another sip of her coffee and gazed out again, this time towards the sea. From her vantage, she could almost forget that there was garbage piled high in the streets beyond the hotel’s walls. When she first arrived in Jacmel, she wondered what dumpster fire she had gotten herself into. She would sit in the library and stare out at the compound, watching the groundskeeper rake foil candy wrappers into a pile and burn them.
She wasn’t homesick exactly, but she felt alienated by the part of herself which sought to do something objectively good. What did she have to teach anybody? How to organize a file cabinet, or how to program a machine? How to separate the chaos of their intensely difficult situation into neat little problem piles?
Months ago, she would have claimed she hardly believed in order. She would have called herself a radical black eco-feminist. She would have uttered the word anarchy and believed in it. She would have dared to suggest self-sufficiency, despite the taxes she paid and the paved roads and the running water, and the electric switches, and the conditioned air, and the military, and the fuel prices fixed by international superpowers that kept vehicles driving on those paved roads. She had learned in her Black Studies courses that these physical representations of so-called developed society were not the heart and soul of a culture. She had read Fanon and Rodney, had been incensed by the underdevelopment of black nations and misguided attempts to rectify it. But she was a development worker, now. She was the one teaching a third language to children who would grow up to be unemployed.
Between politic and praxis there was a sliver of space called life. Danielle returned her gaze to the principal and wondered what could possess someone to be so faithful, to pursue such a hopeless cause.
When they finished their meal, Danielle and the principal took a walk around the hotel grounds. Danielle admired a vine of hibiscus growing over a short stone wall. The principal snapped photos of the patio design to send to her architect.
“You’ll be okay,” the principal said. “I was overzealous at your age, too.”
The following Monday, Danielle stood outside the mathematics classroom waiting for a good moment to walk in. She had papers from administration to send home with the kids. Math was her worst subject, and as she listened along, she feared that, had she grown up in Haiti, she would not have made it to high school. They were working on variables, solving for x.
Mr. Mesidor’s voice rose into a shout.
“How will you pass your exams if you can’t complete this simple problem?” he said. Nadine was at the board, arms stiff at her sides and eyes locked with the teacher who stared her down.
Danielle knocked on the doorframe. “I have papers for the students,” she said.
“Come in,” he said. He straightened up, tugged at his checkered shirt.
Danielle gave instructions for parental signatures by the end of the week. She made towards the door and Mr. Mesidor called out to her.
“Please tell the administration to call Nadine’s parents,” he said. “I need to keep her after school.”
Nadine’s punishment did not stop Mr. Mesidor from his daily field trip to the library. Thirty minutes after dismissal, he walked in with Nadine in tow.
“She’s not feeling well. Can she stay here for a moment?” he asked.
“As long as she doesn’t touch my books,” Danielle said. “And takes her shoes off.”
Nadine left her shoes outside the library door. Danielle cleared a space on the rug and gestured at the girl to lay down. Nadine still refused to meet Danielle’s eyes. She tugged at a loose pleat in her skirt, making it worse. Danielle’s feeling came back, the one the principal called misunderstanding. The misunderstanding rang like a gong in her brain.
The secretary popped her head into the open library door.
“There’s electricity but the printer won’t work,” she said.
Another line in her job description was reading English alerts on donated American appliances. Danielle dropped her rags and followed the secretary to the main office. The library door was wide open, and through it she looked back to see Mr. Mesidor again, touching the encyclopedias.
It took twenty minutes to reset the geriatric block of parts that passed for a printer in the main office. The secretary nearly shoved Danielle out of the way once it was finished, scrambling to beat the invisible clock that was evening electricity hours. She had payment plan notices to print for a long list of parents, and second trimester exams, too.
“Thanks,” the secretary said, as Danielle left to find some soap and a spigot for her ink smeared hands. On her way to the toilets, she noticed the library door was closed. The door was closed but only she had the key. She opened it up in the mornings and locked it every evening around six. It was four thirty and the door was closed, but Nadine’s shoes were still outside.
Danielle took the steps to her library two at a time, snatched at the handle. It had not been locked, only pushed from inside. She saw in the dim light a flash of brown skin, Mr. Mesidor’s hand pulling away from Nadine’s pleated skirt. They both sat upright on the rug. Mesidor hurried to his feet, talking fast, talking nonsense. Danielle’s throat closed, she said nothing, not even a gasp. She could think of nothing to say, a feeling of intense distress coiling up her arms. As Mr. Mesidor was softening his eyes, gathering his charm that worked so well on naïve girls, Danielle stepped onto the carpet with her sandaled feet and knocked four knuckles straight into his face.
Blood ran from Mesidor’s nose and dribbled over his lips. Nadine sat on the mat with eyes wide, hands clasped together in her lap.
“Nadine, get up,” Danielle said, but she didn’t wait for Nadine to move. She yanked the girl up by the bicep and hurried her out of the library without stopping for her shoes. Mr. Mesidor clambered behind them, pinching his nose with the collar of his shirt.
“Sit,” Danielle said to Nadine, depositing the girl in a chair inside the secretary’s office.
“What happened?” the secretary asked, but Danielle was already pressing the principal’s contact on her phone.
Outside the front gate screeched on its sliding track, and a motorcycle thrummed to life. Danielle and the secretary ran to the window and watched Mesidor slip through the front gate without closing it behind him.
Danielle’s call went to voicemail. She turned back to Nadine, whose eyes were beginning to take on a familiar, glassy stare.
“Nadine,” Danielle said. “Are you okay?”
Danielle sat three days later in the tiny airport on Route des Orangers waiting for her small charter plane to arrive. It was a fifteen-minute ride that cost nearly three hundred dollars, but she would bypass the thick traffic in Port-au-Prince and be deposited neatly at Toussaint Louverture Airport; from there she’d board a JetBlue plane in the direction of JFK.
“You should take a break,” the principal had said to her, after the reports had been made and parents were called. “Go home for Easter, come back refreshed.”
Danielle felt relief at the thought of home. Home was another notion she had troubled and toyed with, along with ‘nation’ and, ‘blan,’ and ‘belonging.’ She thought home was something imagined, an idea that could be deconstructed, and remade. There was a difference between home and homeland, that now she understood. Home was a place you wanted to go when you were worn down, fed up, and exhausted. Wherever it was, you could best identify it from a weary state of mind. Jacmel was perhaps a homeland, but it was never meant to be her home.
The airport was an airy empty building with one large waiting room and vaulted semi-opaque ceilings. The waiting room chairs looked old but not very worn. She’d once heard from the principal that the airport was supposed to be much larger but had “lost” much of its budget during contract negotiations.
She checked in for her flight with an agent in a bright blue polo shirt who hardly even looked at her. Her suitcases were weighed, then her body, both of which were returning to the US much lighter than when they’d arrived. She had packed her bags in a way that was more like emptying them. She left her fan and her rain gear for the secretary. She left her stash of snacks for Kelly and all the books in the library for the children to reorder as they saw fit.
The pilot arrived and helped her into the five-seater plane, which felt to Danielle like the belly of a large bird. She sat in the copilot chair, before a blinking board of complicated buttons. She laced her fingers in her lap to ease the slight shiver that was creeping up her arms.
The engine roared. The plane taxied to the end of the tarmac, turned about face, and then moved forward again, with acceleration. Her gut jolted as they lifted off, and her breath became shallow and tight. From the window to her right, she could see the whole city, its crossing boulevards and grand rues, footpaths carved into the sides of hills and patches of trees growing from dry mountain scalps. Along one street, she counted a trail of nine women with loads on their heads, shrunk down to the size of ants.
Contributor Notes
Savannah Balmir is a Caribbean-American writer and artist from Mount Vernon, New York. She studied English at Howard University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky. Savannah is a Kimbilio Fiction fellow, a 2023 Haitian Studies Association Emerging Scholar, and winner of the University of Kentucky’s 2024 MFA Fiction Award. Her work has been published in SONKU, Castle in Our Skins, and The Seventh Wave Magazine. Savannah is currently at work on her first collection of short stories.
