Fiction

Malak Mattar, My Mother (detail), 2017, oil on canvas
Featured
Hardest
What people meant by hardest was how cold. What I meant about worst was how alone. Coldest in at least over a hundred, you’d hear over and over. And it was cold, and it was dark, and the winds never stopped from the season we used to call fall clear through to now, what before was called summer.
The Hooghly River
Chandu measured her day not by hours but by the clock of her bladder, by how much time elapsed between trips to the toilet. Thirty minutes, twenty minutes, thirty-five, fifteen, fifteen, fifteen. A strong, dark stream the first few times, after she woke late in the morning, her small room brimming...
The Last Train
I could tell it was her, even from afar: the self-serviced closecropped hair, her zany leggings, and the neon Nike Flight windbreaker she always wore, no matter the season. And since Raven had no business being on campus, I gave it all a second look, knowing something was either off or about to...
Night Shift
All That Hunger, All That Thirst
July and August used to be the best month because that is when school would be out for the summer. Is real funny how they call it summer when Guyana is summer all year round, eh? But back then them thing didn’t matter. All the children would rest up on the weekend after school close and by Monday...
Hut
I go down to my hut. I go down every day. I go in the afternoon. I go when the afternoon meets the early evening. I go alone. I go alone to be alone. I go down to my hut to be alone in my hut with no one. The stretch of garden is long, it narrows the closer I come to its boundary, and as I walk...

The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction
Something, it’s clear, is afoot in African fiction. What these stories seem to announce is a powerful narrative outlook that has almost nothing to do with the West’s expectation of “Africanness.” Instead, it rises from the coming together of individual voices that happen to be broadly, variously African, writers with a straight-on, self-probing honesty and a poetic sort of thoroughness.
From the Archive
Crowds
Absence
Silver Storm
The True Death of Abel Paisley
Having received word of a distant emergency, Maury abandoned us even before the initial evening’s sighting had come to a close, and aware of our likely disappointment, left each of us with a flyer promising more significant views ahead, and a hot wad of candy.