Jahan arrives as footsteps, the sound of worn leather chappals slapping against the wood floors of the corridor to his study. This is new. Usually, he is shadowed against his trees or his now-empty bee house.
What's In a Name by Nicole Y. Dennis-Benn
“Yuh sure it will work, mama?” Faye asked. She often stood on the sidelines, watching her son drink the tea that smelled like rotten eggs. “It will mek him bettah, Faye…trus’ me…have I evah lied to yuh? In di country men who couldn’t perform use to drink dis…It wuk miracles.”
Her mother responded with the authority of a doctor. A woman who knew the science of the herbs she picked. For every ailment there was a bush Mama Elise had in mind. She picked them herself, squatting in the backyard, hovered over some plant like she could see into its compounds; the science of it. Its use. She would grasp the plant by the stem; brown, calloused fists wrapped around it like she would do the neck of a chicken and uproot it.
Dominoes by Glendaliz Camacho
The Moon is Fuller in a Foreign Country by Vanessa Wang
When she thought back on her adolescent years, Min remembered her busy hands. She stood behind the family’s butchering stall, a stained apron around her waist; she pounded her cleaver down on the limp, featherless chicken before her, cutting through the skin, crushing through the bones, slicing the meat into neat, equal pieces. Chop chop chop.
Rén by Lystra Aranal
My story is in the faces of those I pass along Orchard Road on Sundays, the women and men sitting in groups atop picnic mats laid out below stacks of Tupperware—adobo and pansit alongside paper plates—always looking familiar, expectant; yet those who sometimes look at me as if I don’t deserve to approach them and say, “Hello, po. Kamusta, po”—those customary greetings between acquaintances—because I am not exactly of them. Still, they are who I picture in place of the character on the blackboard: all persons—or rén.
