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And all was stripped from her and all she was was wildness and pain and her lungs bursting in the cage of her chest and her body battered by a hundred invisibilities and the terrible swirl.

Out of the wildness, the branch of an oak plucked her from the water and she clung there, animal, as orange dawned over the marsh made alien with mud.

He had learned that horrors could be planted like seeds, spring to life if given the right tenderness of soil, water, and shine. Unfurl slowly beneath the earth’s skin, burrowing down even as it stretched upward toward an open sky. Hiding, at first, its center, it could be coaxed to reveal its core, exposing colors vibrant enough to make even animals weep, unveiling fragrances that could seduce even the most ferocious of bees. You would never know it was poison until you touched it or consumed it, but by then it was already too late. You had already been choked, just like the ones before you. And there was no one left unscathed enough to tell the tale, to warn the next person foolish enough to stop and admire, plucked when they should have just left well enough alone.

It was worse when the cruelty came from other women. It shouldn’t have been; after all, women were people, too. But it was. When women did it, it was like being stabbed with two knives instead of one. Two knives, one in the back and the other in a place that couldn’t be seen, only felt.

To survive in this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by toubab, and Samuel’s list of grievances was long: They pushed people into the mud and then called them filthy. They forbade people from accessing any knowledge of the world and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted, bleeding, and could do no more, then called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts, and then called the pieces savage. They stepped on people’s throats with all their might and asked why the people couldn’t breathe. And then, when people made an attempt to break the foot, or cut it off one, they screamed “CHAOS!� and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order.

EXHIBIT #1 The first night in our new house, I had a dream about a woman who lived under the floor. She smelled raw and cried as she pulled her body between the wide pine planks. I wanted to help her but felt that would be rude somehow. She quieted when she took me outside the house, which miraculously looked exactly like the one we just moved into; our real cars were in the driveway, my real cat was silhouetted in the upstairs window, licking its paw. She brought me into the nearby woods and seated me atop a stump. I watched as she shuffled around a great, gnarled apple tree, humming, dragging her damaged feet. She stopped abruptly and turned toward me, opening her mouth wide. When I woke up, I felt unusual, almost heartsick. The morning was glorious, and my daughter Sophie asked me to join her outside after breakfast to explore our new neighborhood. We went into the woods, discovered an abandoned doll house with three little beds, each bed holding only the head of a doll, nothing more. We kept going, pushing at brambles and dead pine, until we happened upon an apple tree. Around the base of the tree was a muddy, worn path. I felt the blood leave my face, and I could hear music not far off.

EXCELLENT BAKER: would you like a freshly-baked scone?

ME: no thank you. i do not care for scones. i prefer muffins. do you have any muffins?

EXCELLENT BAKER: no, i only bake scones, but i am an excellent baker and they are full of things you like: cinnamon and blueberries and nuts and everyone else loves them. try one. (hands ME the scone)

ME: okay, fine, but i really do not enjoy scones. (eats of the scone, tentatively) okay, i'll grant you—as far as scones go, this is pretty good, but if these flavors were in a thing that i like very much—say, a muffin—i bet it would be even better. will you make me a muffin?

EXCELLENT BAKER: no, i will murder you instead! (stabs ME)

ME: NOOOOOOOOO! (dies)

FIN

(M’Closky jumps up on his chair, throws money in the air, and makes it rain—perhaps literally, perhaps figuratively—the theater is a space of infinite possibility)

The cicadas? They just go on singing—singing loudly, singing incessantly—a long, enormously complicated, deeply layered, entirely improvised, ancient song, which is mostly about the morning, but also about the evening and the day but also the night and the sun but also the moon and about waking up and flying around and what it is like to fly around and about loving each other and hating each other and fucking each other and hurting each other but also about trying to find each other in order to hurt and/or fuck each other but also about falling asleep and then waking up again and the quiet and the noise that accompany each day and the sounds of each other’s voices and the occasional music but mostly about the noise and the grass and the sky and the air and the water but also the water in the air and the heat in the air and the dry in the air and the birds in the sky and the birds on the grass and the birds on the branches and always birds—birds always—but also the sap in the branches and the sweetness of the sap in the branches of the trees but also the trees themselves on the grass and the grass on the dirt but also the dirt itself and how they miss the dirt and how they miss their homes in the dirt, the palaces where they came from, and the feeling of missing the thing you can never go back to and the mystery of the way one moves away from it and through the present and the mystery of the present and the mystery of the movement itself and the leaves on the branches and the birds in the leaves on the branches and the branches on the trees and the trees on the grass and the grass on the dirt and dying.

And we can’t understand any of it.

MINNIE: You ever thought of running away?

DIDO: Aw, hell naw. What am I going to look like running through this hot-ass swamp? Uh-uh.

MINNIE: I know, right? Grace’s ass always talking about running away now that Massa dead and I’m like, “Bitch, you need to calm your busybody ass down.�

MINNIE: Girl, is it just me or has it been really quiet?

DIDO: You know, I was just thinking the same thing.

MINNIE: Right?

(Beat.)

(As they work) Even all these white people are being really quiet. I wonder what’s going on today. I couldn’t read that sign out front, because I can’t read.

DIDO: I can’t read it, either. You know it’s illegal for us to read.

MINNIE: Yeeuh, but I was hopin� you wuz one of them secret readin� niggas. You know, like Rhonda.

DIDO: Rhonda can read?!

MINNIE: Shh, girl! It’s a secret.

I believe an important part of being a good artist is recognizing your limits.
So I can respect the pussies who pussy out of a project.
I respect it when they get their “people� to be all like, “Well, such-and-such doesn’t really get the stuff about slaves.�
I’m like, “What is there not to get? It’s slavery.
And I’m not even asking you to play the slaves.
You’re playing the goddamn slave owner.�
I mean, God forbid you ask a black guy
to play some football-playing illiterate drug addict
magical negro Iraq vet with PTSD who’s
secretly on the DL with HIV but who’s
also trying to get out of a generic ghetto with his
pregnant obese girlfriend who has anger-management issues
from a history of sexual abuse�
in fact, everyone’s been sexually abused
and it all climaxes with someone’s mother having a
monologue
where she’s snotting out of her nose and crying everywhere
because she’s been caught smoking crack
and fired from her job as a hotel maid�

(Beat)

(I just made that up…Dibs.)

(Beat)

God forbid any actor of color not jump at the chance
to play an offensive bag of garbage
so far from his own life
but which some idiot critic or marketing intern is going
to describe as
a gritty, truthful portrayal of “the black experience
in America,� but the minute you ask a white guy
to play a racist whose racism isn’t
“complicated� by some monologue
where he’s like,
“I don’t mean to be racist!
It’s just complicated!�
he doesn’t return your phone calls?
Then my therapist was like,
“Don’t you think you ought to not shit where you eat?�
and I was like
“Well, what happens if I shit where I starve?�

I woke to find her lying next to me, quite d

I woke to find her lying next to me, quite dead, with her throat torn out. The pillow was shiny and sodden with blood, like low-lying pasture after a week of heavy rain. The taste in my mouth was familiar, revolting, and unmistakable. I spat into my cupped hand: bright red. Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Here we go again.

The first book in a

The first book in a can't-put-it-down, can't-read-it-fast-enough action-thriller trilogy that's part Hatchet, part Little Shop of Horrors!

Petra knew from her dad that the little hospital was already overloaded. For most people, it was like having a really bad cold, or the flu. But some people had much more severe reactions—or life-threatening asthma attacks—and needed to be transferred to Victoria or Vancouver—where the hospitals were also packed.

A few people hurried from their cars into the shops, sneezing, covering their faces. A lot of people wore masks—a very common sight since the pollen started flying. Petra had even seen a few people with those scary heavy-duty things with the canister filter. Like in pandemic movies.

A powerful historical debut about two orphaned siblings coming of age during America's Gold Rush. Born to parents who left China for better prospects (heh), the pair forge their individual identities—one craving adventure, the other stability, as they navigate a land hostile to otherness on their search for a place to call home.

Claudine couldn't see them outside the salon's picture window, her head stuck under a hooded dryer. With a freshly French-manicured hand, she reached into her cream-colored Chanel flap bag and pulled out the guest list: not counting herself, Henry, and their six employees. There hadn't been much time to put the list together. Zara had let her know she was coming just a few days before. Considering the short notice and how packed Aspen social calendars were during the holiday season, these were good, solid choices:

Captain and Mrs. Tiggleman
Kevin and Jerry
The Alpine Brothers

Community radio host Ciara receives dozens of unmarked cassette recordings every week and broadcasts them to a listenership of none. Ex-musician Tom drives an impractical bus that no one ever boards. Publican Jenny runs a hotel that has no patrons. Rick wanders the aisles of the Woolworths every day in an attempt to blunt the disappointment of adulthood.

In a town of innumerable petrol stations, labyrinthine cul-de-sac streets, two competing shopping plazas, and ubiquitous drive-thru franchises, where are these people likely to find the truth about their collective past � and can they do so before the town completely disappears?

Shaun Prescott’s debut novel The Town follows an unnamed narrator’s efforts to complete a book about disappeared towns in the Central West of New South Wales. Set in a yet-to-disappear town–a town believed by its inhabitants to have no history at all–the novel traces its characters� attempts to carve their own identities in a place that is both unyielding and teetering on the edge of oblivion.

Slumped in the lounge with the bottle between his legs, Rob said it was very painful having a person fall out of love with you. Every day when he woke up, it was only a matter of seconds before he remembered that he was in immense pain. The immense pain did not subside until he passed out that night. Before, he could never have imagined what it would be like to feel so much pain. He had not thought it feasible that this amount of pain could affect one person at any given time. It was simply intolerable. Why did people continue living when this much pain was possible?