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Tonalli: Soul of development, reason, warmth; inhabits the skull. To cross the threshold that splits the living world and enter the City of the Dead, we must first pay the Tlamatini. Nine pesos wrapped gently in a bundle of maize husks is what I hand him. The pesos are the real kind, stamped in […]
Listen. There’s a rite of passage all Yineng girls go through when it’s time for us to become women. Here’s how it goes. On the first full moon after you turn fourteen, you will need to go to the nearest river. For me, it was the stream that cuts through the ditch behind Aldean Textiles, […]
It’s working. With every buzzing, burning line Rae traces on my back—the needle feels like a red-hot knifepoint drawn across the skin—it’s working. I was terrified when we began, not of the pain but of the uncertainty: would this do anything at all, would there be any difference whatsoever in the dream I’ve been trapped […]
Content Note: Sexual Assault, abuse, traumatic miscarriage, psych ward treatment, and suicide. It is 2091, and Grace is staring at the rabbit in the corner of her visual overlay. It is an Angora rabbit, fluffy and white, and when Grace picked the icon out, she did not realize how much she would come to […]
October 1st The rabbit was back this morning. It stopped outside the portal like it always does and it checked its pocket watch like it always does. It doesn’t matter—the rabbit’s always late. So far I never found out what the rabbit is late for. It wore a jazzy waistcoat. It looked nervously from […]
For Anne, who always believed I could Chapter One They did not want to accept me into their elite universities. It did not matter that I succeeded on every entrance exam I took; not only was I a woman, the first mark against me, but I also came from a nation that the […]
They say the City was once the largest in the world. They say its buildings stretched across the valley and crept up the hills and peaks until every inch of land was covered in concrete from mountain range to mountain range. They say the sky was always grey and at night you couldn’t see the […]
Content Note: Child Abuse and Assault Lila found the cat market when she was seven. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say the cat market found her. It was the night of the Harvest Moon, and the maize and the soybean were almost in. The villagers had gathered around a crackling fire, the […]
There’s a story that sounds completely fantastic and yet is true. It happened here and in the neighboring lands. It goes like this: Once upon a time, there was an ocean, deep and cold. And in the ocean there was salt. For a long time, salt did not know itself to exist. But then, beneath a […]
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