The car was full of passengers and all seats were occupied except for one. Third row isle was a good seat. He took the seat and did not look outside the window. The yellow walls were hypnotic. The advertisement was irritating. The metal poles looked too icy to touch and were perhaps smeared with strangers’ snot. Although the dark green seat was not as plush as his old sofa, he fell asleep on it. From thirteen o’clock to thirteen sixty-nine, all the passengers got off. He was left alone. A young girl in black boots stepped onto the train and stood next to him.
Jahannam: A Justification of the Ways of God to Men by Najah Yasin
Sererie by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
When disappeared girls are lucky, they go to other places and hook their husbands’ names to theirs like snake cords to clothing sacks. Then they send messages back home, telling us who they are now. Before today, when I was a child, I thought this was what happened to my sister, Azmera. I thought she disappeared to New York and became Azmera Mitslal, a man’s wife, a woman, with a face and a life as new as a baby’s. But Azmera was not lucky. This is what I am learning now.
What's For Sale by Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn
At old Fort Craft Park Delores links hands with the flush faced men in floral shirts who are too polite to decline, and the women in broad straw hats whose thin lips fix in frightened smiles. Before the tourists pass Delores’s stall, she listens to the prices the other higglers quote them—prices that make the tourists politely decline and walk away. So by the time they get to Delores—the last stall in the market—she’s ready. She pounces.