A hotel waitress flees an act of violence and stumbles into a fabulist slice of desert between Egypt, Israel, and the Gaza Strip, where she experiences a sweeping vision. Second-place winner of LitMag’s 2020 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction.
“Her pupils sat expansively in her eyes, dark lakes on a marked but emptied landscape, the tracks on her forehead ending at the edge of the deep.” Winner of the Calvino Prize, selected by Brian Evenson. Read it in Salt Hill. (And check out the UK-based Sein und Werden, which published an earlier version of the story in its Pharmacopoeia issue.)
“It was far more objectionable, she told me, to be called a boy, or a double-boy, than to be called a goat. And so a goat I became.” A Jerusalem adolescence on the eve of the first Intifada: a Conjunctions online exclusive.
“She was sucking on a clump of moss, emptying it like a juice box. I felt that twinge of pique I get whenever someone slurps in my presence, but I put a lid on it.” Finalist for the SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction. Read it and all the contest winners in SmokeLong’s 15th Anniversary Issue. (And read the “Smoke & Mirrors” interview here.)
“That sealed it. The baby was Punny; the rabbit was Happening.” In After the Pause.