Tag: Reflective

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Going Wenera by Talent Madhuku

He’s going Wenera, his path winds endlessly. He’s finding the path hard to follow. It’s very narrow, and it continuously twists and shifts. Sometimes when he sits down and rests, he wakes up and discovers that his path isn’t there anymore. He’s trying to understand the order of things around him, but everything seems arbitrary. Boulders, rifts and high mountains suddenly appear along the way. Now and then he has to walk over them or around them. It’s frustrating, his passage is proving to be excruciatingly exhausting.

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What an Answer’s Worth by Tyler Plofker

I found the note, transcribed below, stuck in a yellowing copy of Jacques the Fatalist, borrowed from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library a few months ago. I submitted it to the online magazine you’re now reading because it seems to be what the author would have wanted—to make sure the contents continue on.

The note wasn’t dated or signed, but it looked fairly old (semi-brown, stained in parts, and wrinkly, but not falling apart).

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A Purple Tutu by Leo Gibson

Did you know that I was an incredibly gay kid when I was 4 years old? I don’t mean that I knew that I liked men at that age, but I definitely was such a stereotypical caricature of a gay man. I never loved Disney princes, only princesses. My favorite colors were pink and purple, and I always wanted to wear those massive rainbow beads. However, there was one thing that was the cream of the crop of my four year old flamboyance. This shiny, purple tutu with ruffles. We have video footage of me prancing around outside with a glittering tutu whilst my parents make snide, but non-offensive comments that I couldn’t understand because I lacked any sort of cognitive ability.

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The Falcon and The Fox by Mitchell Near

Bernard had planned for today to be the last day of his life. He stared out the window of his office on the 35th floor of the Maxwell building, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. If he peered through the telescope he kept near the window, he could see The Campanile of the University of California, Berkeley campus.  It supposedly resembled St. Mark’s Campanile in Piazza San Marco in Venice. He didn’t see it that way. He saw it as an artifice, an historical pastiche derived from a tower in an ancient European city. As far as Bernard was concerned, it was a failure, same as him.

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Speaking English with an Accent by Gauri Sirur

Four days after I moved with my family from Mumbai, India, to Cleveland, Ohio, I picked up the phone to order pizza. I had eaten pizza twice before in Mumbai–at a small eatery that served a spicy-sweet sauce and cheese on a six-inch pizza base. (This happened over twenty years ago. In 2021 pizza is widely available in India.) But now in Cleveland, I couldn’t wait to try the exotic version I’d seen in American TV shows and comic books.

I dialed a number from a flyer that had come in the mail. “Hello, I would like to order pizza.”

“Sure,” said a young male voice at the other end. “You have Q-pins?”

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