Category: Fiction

At 2:15 PM, I removed the extra “haha” that I had written on the work group chat.  Earlier that morning, at around 10:00 AM, I had found out that Khaled got promoted.  Khaled.  My coworker who does, more or less, the exact same job I do.  Apparently, he “needed the opportunity more.”  Which, translated loosely…

The sound of war planes and foreign drones has become the background noise to her life.  Sometimes, she doesn’t need to turn on the TV in the living room nor the small, wooden radio she has in her kitchen when she’s doing chores; the hum of that white, six-legged alien in the sky is enough.…

It was far too late to sell himself. He sat on the sidewalk, empty of thought and emotion. At first, in an attempt to escape, he tried to market himself as a Middle Easterner. But they had already filled the quota. He then tried to market himself as a special kind of Middle Easterner, a…

I woke up to the sound of my window glass rattling.  Not shaking, not the kind of sound you can flip to the other side and ignore.  I opened my eyes and stayed there for a second, looking at the ceiling as if it might have anything new to offer. Then I reached for my…

‘I can’t find Stanley anywhere. I’ve looked in all his usual hiding places.’ Her voice breaks. She’s not speaking in a haste, as one would expect her to in such a situation; there’s a subtle melancholy in her voice, almost as if she’s already anticipating the worst possible scenario.  Before she noticed that Stanley was…

What does it mean when a woman sells the most precious thing she owns?  I’ve seen it happen countless times, particularly in 2019, after the country plunged into the most catastrophic financial crisis of modern history. I’ve seen hungry women sitting on the side of the street approach me with what little charm they had…