Issue 21 — Spring 2026

Creative Nonfiction

running away home again to dar es salaam

mike sluchinski

i sat there and the aroma of diesel first then cooking with palm oil then after a few moments the rain and a rainy season and a sullen progression to a dry time so dry that you or anyone really can smell the clay outside the city it cakes up the clay does and parched side roads and drying river beds give off this earth smell and that’s how it all starts my memory of dar es salaam that

was my home my first real home before i was dragged back to canada yes those were times before the famine in ethiopia and also at a time when things were getting better for these cities these former colonies these new cities to many but old very old also to many more it was a memory and place of sultans and it’s always a choice to go back in time to home and it’s always the smell of diesel and that lurid kind of pumpkin palm oil orange oil that smell of it cooking or grease from exhaust fans and back alleys that’s how it starts and once i go i take some time to go back and i still feel that way africa and africans haunt me and haunt my dreams but the haunting

is an invitation because it’s grand that trip that journey back i follow that river and i trace the banks and i go back but the only thing to compare it to is a haunting because those bare words like ‘transported back’ are not justice to the situation my life but i want this haunting and there’s no fear involved none and i’d go back and i do go back and sometimes smoke does it for me also you know that smoke or charcoal smell not the fires of the northern pine in canada because it’s a different scent so very not the same as those harder woods or drier woods or tropical under the equator cook fires and yes in dar es salaam you can still see some cook fires and there’s a regular

call to prayer too and if you’re lucky you’ll hear it again and again and your days you can count your own prayers no matter religion i pray every time i hear it and it makes my own faith stronger and in that connection that conduit i feel like i’m attaching my own wires to the power line hitting that energy you know it the city the life and sometimes the animals that live there too i’m scared of the bats and it’s not hard to see them but mostly they stay under the eaves and so even that seems orderly but dar es salaam that’s the first place i go to and the place i was taken i hope i can forget it and i really do i try not to think about it and even then when we first came back to the snow and cold and those people yes they’re sure different from africans and even as a

kid i tried running away from the snow and the winter and the canadian jokes about the cold and it was never funny and they seemed to be just barely surviving when the place we went to help we went to help dar es salaam and everyone said they were poor and they really weren’t they spent time living sometimes hard and sometimes well but even with all the animals and at that time animals still ate a lot of people every year or attacked them whether they were lions or hyenas but the africans and that city that city that wasn’t what it was supposed to be they lived and so the aromas carry me back and no kidding diesel doesn’t smell great but it starts my

journey back home back to a place and a people who lived and spent their time living and that’s the difference the real difference and i don’t care if you disagree but if a kid can tell the difference in a people and in their outlook or in their worldview or whatever flashy words they make up to describe culture or way of life these days well if a kid can tell the difference and still pack a suitcase and run away back to africa and dar es salaam don’t you think that’s home i mean nobody wants to have to just survive and with six months of winter that’s all the people do and it’s shaped them to fit that and don’t bother telling them that i already did and they didn’t and don’t listen no they don’t they get defensive and say if you don’t like it they say get lost go go

get lost go back and so then that’s all i can really do and so i will go back it’s not easy maybe it’s not easy to live there and some they scramble they scramble for food and a job but i look around and i smell diesel and i take the time to get carried back i go back in memory and after so much time it’s no mirage and so i just need to get back home to dar es salam it’s not a cold place but canada is just so cold and hard that there’s warmth in the air in dar es salaam and i hope i can run away again and i’ll see smiles and hear the call to prayer again in dar es salaam

mike sluchinski is a recent pushcart prize nominee and adds dadaist, ekphrastic, stream of consciousness, and pop art elements to his punk and post punk collages, poetry, fiction, and non. he’s grateful to be part of heartwood literary magazine, dublin poetry walk '24 & '26, superfan/dear easy mac, FLARE: flagler review, scifaikuest, tulane review, mantis, failed haiku, inlandia journal, kaleidotrope, eternal haunted summer, the wave (kelp), the literary review of canada, the coachella review, welter, poemeleon, lit shark, proud to be vols. 13 & 14, the ekphrastic review, meow meow pow pow, kelp journal, the fib review, south florida poetry journal (soflopojo), freefall, pulpmag, in parentheses, and more coming!​

What Fire Doesn’t Burn

Kelsey Erin Shipman 

The first place I ever learned to read people was in a plywood shack off Jacksboro Highway, where the gun lived next to the cash box and the customers brought their own beer. For a decade of my life, I spent school holidays manning the counter of my family’s fireworks stand in a small town west of Fort Worth, Texas. The shack was cramped with pink carpet stapled over warped boards and a hole in the floor. It was shabby, but it taught me how danger and desperation announce themselves long before anyone opens their mouth.

By the time I was twelve, I’d already watched fistfights erupt over spilled beer, drug addicts gum their requests for change, drunk cowboys leer at me and my prepubescent sister, and my family’s yearly income vanish into sticky fingers. That’s why we kept a pistol by the cash box—you never knew what the ten days before July Fourth might bring.

Ben, my mother’s longtime boyfriend, grew the fireworks stand from a one-window shack into an eight-window operation that functioned as a community center. In a town of barely a thousand people, the stand became a local landmark and was regularly featured in the local paper. Ben was so good at the business that he earned an entire year’s income in the two weeks when it was legal to sell fireworks in Texas.

Imagine a man who quoted Noam Chomsky while sporting a long, thin braid down his back. Ben looked like every other man in that corner of Texas—a trailer, a pickup truck, a rat tail—but he was unlike the customers who assumed he was one of them. He’d grown up in rural East Texas around people just like them, which meant he understood their rhythms, their suspicions, and how to stay out of trouble. In that part of Texas, belonging could save you.

Outside the stand, Ben was someone else entirely. In the nineties, Ben worked as the overnight groundskeeper at a hospice center where my mother volunteered as a nurse for patients with HIV and AIDS, many of whom were former drug users with active warrants. When Fort Worth police periodically raided the place to make their monthly quotas, Ben locked the doors and refused to let them haul out the sick and dying men. It was there that he first met my mother, another liberal, drawn to the same work and the same people.

I grew up hearing stories about how Ben helped shuttle refugees from El Salvador across the border as part of a Quaker-organized rescue network, and how he’d “hold his nose,” as he put it, organizing for conservative Democrats in North Texas. None of that made it into his daily persona at the fireworks stand. He hid the parts of himself that would’ve made him a target, the way progressives in red states learn to do. A good thing, because fireworks season in Azle, Texas was high-stakes theater.

I watched him shift identities seamlessly. He could talk prayer circles with church ladies, deer hides with good ol’ boys, and litter sizes with dog-breeding grandmas. They all loved him for it. Shirtless teenagers spilled out of pickup trucks and offered him warm Bud Lights like a tribute. And when a group of rough-looking men pushed to the front of the line, Ben would lengthen his vowels, lower his voice, and become the kind of man who might have a boot knife. He wasn’t lying, not exactly. He was performing. And in a place where trouble traveled fast, performance was the way Ben kept us safe.

What none of the customers ever saw was how fast he dropped the act. They’d walk away and Ben would roll his eyes. “A lot of these people have never been housebroken,” he’d say after someone ashed a cigarette on the counter or a kid took a backhand. He didn’t mind taking their last dollar, but he struggled with the way hard lives made hard edges.

Ben often ricocheted between contempt for customers and an almost compulsive need to intervene in their lives. Sometimes that looked like a free bag of fireworks for the grandkids, and sometimes it looked like offering a job to the most desperate people, even when it was clearly bad for us, the two teenage girls from the suburbs.

James was often one of the last customers to leave the stand at night. An adult meth addict, he had a stare that felt like a hand sliding somewhere it shouldn’t. Half his front teeth were missing; his face was deeply weathered and permanently flushed, messy blond curls shoved under a trucker hat. He perpetually smelled of sweat and carried the breathless, startled energy of someone always searching for his next fix. He worked for us one summer, as did his traumatized girlfriend, who often showed up at the stand with fresh bruises.

James lingered around my sister and me. He leaned against the siding, letting his eyes rest on us too long. I was afraid of him and pitied him at the same time, and I never wanted to be left alone in his presence. I learned to narrow my eyes, cross my arms, to stand like the kind of girl who would shoot first and never ask questions. No one intervened. We were left to manage our own fear, the way children often are when adults confuse proximity with supervision.

At the end of that summer, we discovered five thousand dollars missing from the cash box. Even then, Ben let James move into the empty trailer behind the stand, next to Jay, a retired, half-blind handyman living out of a similarly abandoned camper. Our land filled with lives Ben tried to hold, even when holding them cost the rest of us.

Sometimes, Ben brought in his friends from the city to help at the stand. Grayson, an actor-artist with almost no idea what any firework actually did, improvised elaborate descriptions with absolute confidence. “This one is fabulous—dazzling colors, loud crackles, you can’t leave without it.” When a man came looking for a fountain called Dreamer, Grayson picked up a Reflection and said, “They changed the name and spruced up the packaging, sir.” The man bought it without hesitation.

Karl, a photographer new to fireworks, treated the place like a living anthropological exhibit. He adored the shirtless, toothless, tattooed country characters far more than the rest of us. Quietly peeking around corners with his massive camera, he snapped shots of everything: shirtless men in cutoffs with trunks full of artillery shells; barefoot kids shoving Black Cats in their pockets; tired grandmothers corralling punky adolescents with M-60s.

And then there were Brenda and Linda, a lesbian couple with matching blonde hair whom I adored. Brenda was tall, with deep laugh lines, and could sling a fat box of artillery shells over one shoulder. She was one of the first women I ever saw outwork any man. Her pet iguana, “Ike,” was my favorite creature on earth, and my sister and I would fight for the chance to go to their house to see him in his floor-to-ceiling enclosure munching on trays of fresh produce.

If the customers had known the crew behind those windows—artists, queers, liberals, oddballs—they might have peeled out of the parking lot. Instead, they assumed we were one of them. That was the trick. Or the con. Or maybe, as I’d later understand, the performance required to stay paid and unharmed.

Standing behind the counter, I began to see how want moves through a body. People with no shoes and no teeth handed over whole paychecks for explosives that would burn out in minutes. Children who’d lost fingers to fireworks returned to the stand year after year. Men drunk before noon counted nickels for a single string of Black Cats. I used to wonder why the poorest customers spent so much on something so temporary. But poverty teaches you to take your joy fast, loud, and all at once. Before anyone can take it from you.

My favorites were always the barterers. One man who’d been coming to the stand for years often traded his woodworking for fireworks. Once he brought us a beautiful, handmade oak cradle and asked us to “keep it in the family.” The kids across the street often showed up with a sack of homemade barbecue. We’d get jars of pickles, buckets of fried chicken, and every now and then a fresh snow cone melting down the sides of a Styrofoam cup. Poor people will give you their best stuff; rich people just give you money. I learned that at twelve.

Fire danger was constant, the kind of background hum you got used to until it roared to life. One afternoon, Ben lit a broken bottle rocket and shot it from his bare hand. I remember him chuckling like a kid as it sputtered, shot upward, and arced across the highway. His grin vanished when it dropped into the tall grass on the other side of the road and flames leapt up in a hungry line.

My mother shouted for me to find my sister, her voice sharp with panic. Grayson, tall, lanky, moving like a cartoon character in crisis, took off across Jacksboro Highway with a clunky, water-based fire extinguisher, dodging cars as he ran. Somehow, the flames never hopped the asphalt. They died out on the far side of the road, leaving a blackened patch of grass and all of us shaken.

Another day, teenagers from the lake (the “rich” part of town) rolled up in a lifted truck wanting illegal bamboo fireworks. Of course, Ben had them in the back. He let the boys shoot them off on his land behind the stand for a premium price. They tied a bundle of bamboo sparklers together to make a homemade “bomb;” it spiraled into the air like helicopter blades and landed a hundred feet over our fence in a patch of pine trees. One went up in a whoosh of orange flames.

The third fire was the one that scared me most. My cousin, only five at the time, dropped a morning glory sparkler in the dry grass in front of the trailer. Flames raced across the field in seconds. My mother panicked and told us to fill pots with water from the kitchen sink. We darted back and forth, sloshing water across the smoke, until Ben came barreling up the driveway yelling, “Grab the hose!”

But the moment that cut deeper than any fire came from a different kind of danger. A sharply dressed Black man and his young son were leaning against the counter comparing fountains when a drunk local planted his pale arms on the plywood and asked, “Hey, y’all got any n—-chasers?”

The air went still. Even the ever-present whine of cicadas hushed.

Ben lifted his eyes. “Sir,” he said, “those are called whistle chasers. Only idiots call them that.”

The Black father slid a little to the right, placing his body between the man and his child.

The drunk blinked. “Oh, uh, well I’se always called ’em that. Ever since I’se a kid.”

Ben’s disgust sharpened. “Well,” he said, “no one I know calls them that. Oh wait—there was this one other idiot who used to call them that…”

That insult landed a little closer. The man blinked, confused, considering whether he’d just been called stupid twice. He muttered something and shuffled to another window. In another fireworks stand, off another highway, things could have gone very differently.

By then I’d learned the stand was a place where you could witness the full range of human gratitude and cruelty in a single hour. It taught me how to read danger before it had a name, how to scan for exits, how to adjust my voice and posture to keep myself safe. But it also taught me there are moments when you don’t adjust, when you choose who you are instead.

If my childhood had a classroom, it was that shack with the pink carpet and the loaded pistol. And the lesson that stayed with me was this: even in the most combustible places, there are ways to hold your ground without blowing everything up.

Kelsey Erin Shipman is a writer, educator, and recovering Texan based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her work has appeared in Off Assignment, Orange Blossom Review, HuffPost, and African American Review. She co-runs Write Up, an online community for writers building sustainable creative careers, and publishes the Substack newsletter Cheese Toast with White People. She is at work on a memoir about food, family, and the strange inheritance of Southern white culture. Visit her website at www.kelseyshipman.com.

Ghost in the Mirror

Ailee Sutton

Clayton was born with the weight of a saddle he had never worn. His head thrummed with hoofbeats that once were his. His ears rang with the cheer of a crowd he had never seen. His heart pulsed with the love of a woman he had never met. And his body shuddered at the eyes of an industry he had forever changed. How can you attempt to replicate once in a lifetime greatness? By cloning one of the greats himself.

"He looks so much like Scamper, when I walked into the stall and looked at him, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.” Even Charmayne James, owner of the legend himself, could barely tell the difference between the two horses.

Scamper didn’t know he was destined to change an industry – a sport spanning a near century. Thanks to Yellowstone, most think barrel racers crazy because of the horses they ride and the cowboys they date. Barrel racing requires three turns in a cloverleaf pattern around three – often metal – barrels. Knock one down and you receive a five second penalty – a death sentence in a timed sport decided by hundredths of seconds. Madness comes with the territory. Even when the women are winning, rodeo is a man’s world. Constantly walking the line of femininity, cowgirls cannot falter when things go wrong. The time clock doesn’t care how much you’ve sacrificed. The crowd doesn’t care how much is weighing on you. Go out and win, or you’ve got no place on the rodeo circuit. The expectations placed on them are insatiable — to win without wavering to prove again and again that they belong in a space never designed for them.

Rodeo sells itself as the last frontier of freedom. It’s a stage for the untamable spirit, where man and beast collide in raw, elemental competition. The deeper you go, the more the seams show. It’s not about wildness. It’s about the illusion of it. There’s nothing spontaneous about a 14-second barrel run that took five years of training to perfect. The rodeo world romanticizes unpredictability but demands consistency. We cheer for the cowboy who “hangs on,” the girl who “lets it fly,” but only as long as they hit their marks. Step outside the bounds and you're no longer a legend in the making. You're a cautionary tale.

The horses don’t run wild. They run circles. The riders don’t get free. They get scored.

It’s a culture that rewards control masquerading as courage. The fastest times come from the most micromanaged of bodies. Horses bred for sprint are shaped by hands that know how to push and when to punish. We prize grit, but only if it’s palatable. Only if it wins.

The Roslin Institute in Scotland gave birth to the first mammalian clone. From the somatic cell of an adult sheep’s mammary gland grew Dolly. What was destined to nourish an infant instead nourished an entire scientific community, advancing technological capabilities past what was ever considered possible. Mammary glands nourish and give. Well, they gave and we took – suckling the beauty of creation straight from the source. Dolly’s creation shifted reproduction into production; mother into machine. A gland became a womb, and Dolly became a whole from only a part. There’s a sick sense of irony in the fact that Dolly Parton’s breasts were the inspiration for the name of said scientific miracle. “We couldn’t think of a more impressive pair of glands,” claimed one of the lead scientists. That’s where we started. That’s where cloning originated. Watering down a monumental creation of life through layers of grotesque artificiality. It oddly makes sense that the first men to clone a mammal viewed the female body as just a shallow amalgamation of parts. Dolly was never made to live a life. She only proved that life was possible.

No one knew Scamper would amount to anything. He bucked off every rider that dared grace his back. At a mere seven years old, just barely matured, Scamper had seen his fair share of auctions, being passed from one old cowboy to another. By the grace of god, a feedlot worker in Clayton, New Mexico took pity on him; whether he saw something special in Scamper or it was dumb luck, the worker brought home a future National Finals Rodeo barrel racing champion and his twelve year old daughter’s ticket to victory. In 1984, at the age of fourteen, Charmayne James and scamper won their first NFR – the first in a streak of ten consecutive NFR championships, a record they still hold today.

No one could have predicted he would have made rodeo history by winning an NFR round bridleless. On his way through the alley, on rodeo’s biggest stage in the world, a screw came loose on Scamper’s bridle, causing the entire headpiece to fall off. He and Charmayne never missed a beat, relying solely on trust and passion to secure a round win. Imagine a race car losing its steering wheel mid lap, yet the driver continues to navigate well enough to win. This was a once in a lifetime moment, and the reason Scamper was the first horse ever inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame.

He is one of the rodeo Greats. Anyone who had the chance to witness him knew it. He was the type of horse you only come across once in your life. A cowboy’s pity, a young girl’s ambitions, a horse’s pure potential – all forces that shaped Scamper into the subject of legends.

I don’t have the power to know if this was pure circumstance or a fate determined by something greater than us all. I won’t pretend to know or play the role of a god who does.

I question if everything Scamper had done, every record he broke, is lessened by his duplication. What does it mean to commit a crime against nature? Scamper carved his name into history, tirelessly chipping away to engrave his legacy, shaped by chance and heart. Clayton’s name was written before he was even born, built not by bolts and lightning but cells in a petri dish.

Using animals for breeding stock is the way of life in the livestock industry. If it has good genetics, you breed it. If it doesn’t, some still breed it. A stallion may go his entire life with only a handful of rides under his belt. A broodmare may never see a saddle. Producing high quality offspring may be the only responsibility these animals ever have, and that is rarely challenged in the industry. Is this really any different?

Was this an act of selfishness on Charmayne’s part? A desperate attempt to cling to the past before it was even gone? Scamper was alive and well in retirement at the time of his cloning. What sort of desperation is trying to outrun time. Naming the duplicate after her hometown, a constant reminder of where everything began. Cloned horses and their offspring are unable to be registered under the American Quarter Horse Registry, history itself rejecting artificial greatness.  Clayton’s one destiny was to be a sire, to build a dynasty, but even that is beyond his reach.

The industry does not blink at breeding for perfection, but it flinches at cloning. The same people who meticulously select sires for their bloodlines turn away from Clayton, as if a body made of Scamper’s cells is somehow more unnatural than the generations of engineered breeding that came before him. If Scamper’s greatness could not be passed down the usual way, was it ever something that could be passed down at all?

Perhaps it is unfair to presume the existentialism of a so-called “lesser being” – to inflict my own empathy onto a horse that knows not what he truly is. Clayton wakes up every day to a barn full of doting grooms. He never has to fear an aggressive hand against him. He has the finest accommodations money can buy. Maybe he is just another face in the stallion barn. Maybe Clayton knows he is loved.

But does he know that love is conditional? There is love ingrained in his genetic makeup, threading within each cellular structure, but it wasn’t truly his.

Does he know people flock to him only because he is the closest they will ever come to greatness? That they view him as merely a living artifact?

Does he know that people only pet him behind his ear because they are in awe of the way he bristles just as Scamper did? The weight of expectations weigh far heavier than any saddle ever could. The ghost of a rider on a ghost of a horse.

The physical body is there, made of cells that already existed once. The inside — the heart — cannot possibly be the same. Scamper’s greatness didn’t lie in his DNA any more than it lied in the dirt of his hooves. You cannot clone the life that shaped him. If Clayton is Scamper without the forces that shaped him, how can he be Scamper? Always behind, following the footsteps carved through blood — never shedding any of his own.

If Dolly was meant to prove life could be replicated, Clayton was supposed to prove greatness could. No one ever expected her to be anything other than she already was. Every day she breathed she accomplished her job. Her tragedy was sterile. If she hadn’t survived birth, the scientists would have counted the trial as a failure. She was attempt #276. At that point, scientists had become accustomed to defeat. They may have been disappointed, but they would have moved onto #277. No mourners for a failed sheep clone. Clayton never had that. He was always destined for more.

Clayton isn’t tragic because he is a clone, a duplicate. He is tragic because he is singular in a way that no one could ever understand. He is a shrine of muscle and blood. He may never amount to anything more than a reflection of a reflection. He lives in limbo; too close to Scamper and yet too far.

But that’s all we really are anyways – just replicas of what came before. Maybe there is absolutely nothing more special about Clayton than any gangly backyard bred feedlot horse. He is a product of the expectations set in front of him — no different than any other. And maybe Clayton is luckier than the rest of us. Freer. Because we know he is as such. The rest of us discover the futility of expectations far too late.

Ailee Sutton is an English Writing undergraduate student who comes from the harsh, northern Upper Peninsula of Michigan. She has a love for creative nonfiction -- combining heart and emotion with true stories. Growing up on a small hobby farm, her creative interest flows towards the natural world and reflects back in her writing.

Cocaine Under Her Fingernail

Grant Patterson

Growing up, my dad was very strict about me getting my hair cut. Every week I had to get a short, clean haircut. A cut that my parents deemed professional. What profession I was preparing for at eight I’m not sure, but I was prepared. Getting me to get a hair cut each week was like trying to put a dog in a kennel when they know it’s coming. I had to be tricked. My dad would come up with the lamest excuses to just get me out of the house. “Hey, son, will you run an errand with me?” “Hey, son, I’m gonna go grab some food—let’s go.” Even just “Hey, son, let’s go for a ride.” He wouldn’t lie to me, only slightly deceive.

We would go to H-E-B, get some fried rice, or just get out of the house. But if it was Saturday, we almost always would end up at the barber shop. The goddamn barber shop. The worst was when I fell asleep in the car and woke up outside of the shop. We’d wait for each of us to get a cut while I listened to old men talk about absolute nonsense. My dad never indulged in the conversation—he’s always been okay just sitting in silence. I don’t have that skill set. I’d look at everything in the room each time. The dart board, hair on the floor, old leather swivel chairs, hair washing stations that were rarely used, the tools sitting in the blue Barbicide. Hearing Judge Judy, Judge Mathis, Law & Order, or if I was lucky, Jerry Springer playing aloud like background music from an old semi-color TV.

I’d impatiently wait in one of the 3-4 chairs Black barbershops tend to have in their “lobby”. Upset that I’d been deceived once again. It was time to spend (or waste) a few hours to look professional for my 3rd grade-classmates. After upwards of an hour of waiting, it would be my turn. Hey Mr.… I’d say as I climbed into the chair, sleepy from eating the chicken and donuts my dad had tricked me with. Still unsure if the juice was worth the squeeze, the bib front cape thing would be tightened around my neck. A 30-something-year-old Black man would ask me what cut I wanted, my dad would tell him, and he’d get to work.

He’d have to grip my head tight as I tried to turn my head to see the TV. I had to know if that day's man was or was not the father. The barber would ask me about how life was. Often not much had changed considering I’d been there the week before. He’d typically try to impart some of his hood wisdom on me by the time he got to the edge-up.

The edge-up is the most crucial part of the Black man’s haircut. If mistakes are made, we can’t just comb it over as others can. We must shave it and start over. I’d sit frozen during this part of the cut. No way I wanted to face ridicule for being bald at school because my ass couldn’t sit still. After the cut was finished, he’d hand me a mirror. He’d let me check the front and the back of my head like the haircut was for me. The cut wasn’t for me. It was for my parents. So they could look at their son and be proud. Not think of their only son as unkempt or bummy.  A sign for them that somebody cared.

I’d give him back the mirror, accepting the same haircut I had for the first 17 years of my life. He’d rub my hairline with at least 70% alcohol, burning the hell out of my pores. I was used to it, but each time the stinging practically brought a tear to my eye. My father paid the barber as he cleaned up the little hair that was dropped. I’d head towards the door, waving goodbye to each barber as I left. I’d feel my burning scalp filled with that day's new hood knowledge.

One lesson I received when I was a bit older was: “Grant, watch the women you hang out with. If you don’t want to do drugs, don’t hang with women that do drugs.” He continued, “One time I was partying with some strippers. We went to a hotel room after, and one had some cocaine under her fingernail. She put it up to my nose, and she was fine as hell, so of course I did it. That’s how I started doing cocaine.“ I didn’t quite know how to react to this advice. On one hand, it was sound. On the other hand, I was finding out too much. I’d never thought about sniffing cocaine from under strippers' fingernails. But at least I knew when the situation arose, which it still hasn’t, I’d know how to handle it.

Driving home after, the freshly cut hairs would be stuck to my forehead, neck, and lining my ears. The consistent Texas sweat would paste hair to my skin in the hot sun. The small hairs would itch in my collar, and I felt the warm leather pressing on my freshly shaved head. I’d accept my balded fate in silence as I looked out of the window, ready to be home. In the silence I’m sure my dad was plotting the next week's lame excuse to get me back in that damn chair.

Grant Patterson is a writer based in Mexico City and author of Café Comunidad (2025), available in ebook and audiobook. His work has appeared in Everything Matters Press, Poetry Habit, and Ritual. 

Fifty-Six Thousand Square Miles

Adnan Adnan

I am Bengali. I am sentimental and I read a lot. If you find Bengalis living in a dumpster, you will also find a few books next to them. That’s how we are!

The novel Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail (Fifty-Six Thousand Square Miles) by Humayun Azad hit the bookstores in late winter of 1994. I’ve heard of the book, I have seen the book, but I was not able to buy the book yet. I went to my favorite bookstore, Jessore Book Center, and almost had a fight with Halim bhai, the owner.

“I am your best customer. How come I do not have a copy of the Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail yet?”
“There are others.”
“So I am not your best customer?”
“I did not mean that. Others knew about this book long before you did and there are hundreds of people on the waiting list already.”
“I don’t know how, but you have to get me a copy. I do not care how you make it happen.”
“Have patience! I will see what I can do.”
“I need one today. I want to read it today. They are all reading it. You are making me late.”
“I just told you I will see what I can do.”
“How much do you want?”
“It’s not about the money. There are people I have to listen to. You know there are powerful people that I have to deal with. You are my friend and I know you want the best for me and I too want the best for you. But there are others who are not my friends, but they have influence over me. To keep my business going I need to satisfy them.”
“I still need a copy of that novel. I am your best customer.”
“I might be able to find a way. Let me talk to someone and see how it goes.”
“Talk what?”
“If you pay a little bit more, then I might be able to find someone who has already read the book and will be willing to sell it to you.”
“Who is that?”
“I do not know. Let me find out.”
“Can you find out now?”
“You don’t take no for an answer do you!”
“I do not. You know that.”
He opened his notebook and looked at the names, the folks who had already purchased the book and the folks who were still waiting to get a hold of a copy. He took his time and then finally identified a couple of names.
“I think these guys might be willing to sell.”
“Names?”
“Mr. Basir and Mr. Hasan.”
“Address?”
“Relax! I will talk to them.”
“Give me the address. I will go right now and ask.”
“They might find it offensive if you ask.”
“I will be polite. I think they would love to see a young boy like me willing to do all this to get a hold of that book. They might actually appreciate it. Readers love other readers. Don’t they?”
“I will give you the address, but promise that you will not bother them. If they say no, then step away. I will work with them later in the day. They will most likely come by in the evening, they often do.”
“I promise.”

I went to Mr. Basir’s house who had purchased the book more than a week ago. He lived on the outskirt of the city. It was difficult to find his house. It was behind an oil mill, and no one really knew who he was even though he lived there for a very long time with his family. He was a Professor of Philosophy at Michael Madhusudan College.

I knocked at the front-gate. A little girl of about nine or ten opened the door.
“Is Mr. Basir home?”
“Yes.”
“May I talk to him? I have an urgent need.”
“Not right now. He is in his studies. He is not to be bothered during these hours.”
“Tell him Mr. Halim sent me for an urgent matter.”
“What is it about?”
“I can only discuss it with him.”
“I will go tell him. Stay here. I don’t think he would talk to you, but please wait here.”
I waited for a long time. She came back.
“Abba will see you. Please come with me.”
I entered the house and followed her to the study. Mr. Basir was reading a book and he had tens of books open on his desk.
He smiled. I smiled.
“What is it about? I only have a few minutes.”
“My name is Adnan. I am fourteen years old. I love to read great books. Mr. Halim sent me to you to inquire whether you would be interested in selling your copy of the Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail. I would like to buy it. I have been looking for a copy for days.”
“You read books like that?”
“I read everything.”
“This is not an age appropriate book for you. I do not think your parents would approve of it.”
“They do not check what I read. I am free to read whatever I want.”
“This is an adult book. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“And they would not mind?”
“No.”
“Where do you live?”
“Our house is on the Ghope Central Road right in front of the Rafik’s Rice Mill. Sheikh Afsaruddin is my grandfather and Rabiul Alam is my father.”
“I will discuss it with your parents on Friday and if they approve it, I will let you borrow the book for two weeks. I do not feel comfortable selling the book to a fourteen year old. I am very pleased to see you here. I am very proud that young people like you go through all this hassle to read a book. I am very happy about that.”
“That’s a long way out.”
“If you would like to read the book, you have to wait. It is a superb book. Something new in our language. Something never been done before. Have patience!”
“You will come by on Friday?”
“Yes.”

I then went to Mr. Hasan’s house. He lived at the other end of the city, almost in the countryside. He worked for the Bangladesh Power Development Board as an auditor.
“I am still on the waiting list. I do not want to give up my spot.”
“How about you give up your spot and I read the book in a day and then give it to you?”
“You are a fanatic. I understand. You are just like me. We are fanatics! I like your proposal. I like it very much. Let me do that. I will get the book first. I will read it right away and then give it to you.”
“There is no chance then?”
“No chance at all! By the way, what else have you read so far?”
“I read everything. I mean if it is good, I will read it.”
“Have you read Rabindranath Tagore?”
“Yes.”
“Kazi Nazrul Islam?”
“Yes.”
“Bankim Chandra?”
“Yes.”
“Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay?”
“Yes.”
“Jibanananda Das?”
“Yes.”
“Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay?”
“Yes.”
“Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay?”
“Yes.”
“Manik Bandyopadhyay?”
“Yes.”
“Sunil Gangopadhyay?”
“Yes.”
“Shakti Chattopadhyay?”
“Yes.”
“Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar?”
“Yes.”
“Michael Madhusudan Dutt?”
“Yes.”
“Satyajit Ray?”
“Yes.”
“Mahasweta Devi?”
“Yes.”
“Humayun Ahmed?”
“Yes.”
“Ahmed Sofa?”
“Yes.”
“Syed Mujtaba Ali?”
“Yes.”
“Ashapurna Devi?”
“Yes.”
“Samaresh Majumdar?”
“Yes.”
“Al Mahmud?”
“Yes.”
“Shamsur Rahoman?”
“Yes.”
“Ahmed Sharif?”
“Yes.”
“And you are only fourteen?”
“Yes.”
“You have great parents!”
“I do.”
“Who is your favorite?”
“Almost all of them!”
“Top three or top five? No?”
“I think Nazrul, Jibanananda, and Shamsur Rahoman deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature. That’s all I can say!”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely!”
“You have very good and refined taste in literature.”
“Thank you.”
“We should discuss literature moving forward.”
“I would love that!”

I went back to see Mr. Halim. He was busy selling Chhappanno Hajar Borgomail. It was selling like there was an emergency of some sort. It was a phenomenon I’ve never witnessed before.
“They do not want to sell it!”
“Were you polite to them?”
“Very.”
“I found someone who would sell but he wants ten times the price!”
“Ten times?”
“Look at it! People are buying it like the world will end later today.”
“I will pay ten times! Can you get me the book right now?”
“Yes.”

I am Bengali. I am sentimental like that!

Adnan Adnan won the Ruth MacLean McGee Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative Nonfiction in 2013. In 2018, he won the Chalk Hill Artist’s Residency grant for his memoir, The Sentimental Pigeon Keeper. Inspired by Jon Fosse’s works, he penned 108 plays in 2024. Adnan’s works have appeared in the Five Minutes, Poetry Habitat, Flash Fiction World, Wingless Dreamer, Mukto-Mona, Reed Magazine, Shipwreckt Books, TWO@SJSU, Pinyon Review, and The Rumpus. He is currently finalizing his memoirs, The Sentimental Pigeon Keeper and Do Not Die Out There. He lives in San Jose, California, with his wife, Farzana, and daughters, Rain and Arabella.