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Tag: Lyricism

Abecedarian by H. B. Asari

By | Fiction, Short Stories | November 8, 2024

Image is a color photograph of red tea kettle and white teacup on a table; title card for the new short story, “Abecedarian,” by H. B. Asari.

  Zones of your brain affected: frontal, temporal, parietal. The doctor points at them in turn on the scan of your brain. Those traitorous parts, shrivelling out of existence, threatening to take pieces of you with them. I look from…

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Omnipresence by Justine Teu

By | Longform CNF, CNF | January 25, 2023

Image is a photograph of four lit beeswax candles in the dark; title card for the new creative nonfiction essay, "Omnipresence," by Justine Teu.

  1. The first ghost I ever learn about is God, circa 1998, in a kindergarten classroom in Queens, New York. My parents have sent me to Catholic school not out of religious devotion, or some need for strictness, but…

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Vegaboy by Leah Bailly

By | Fiction, Excerpt | December 16, 2022

Image shows a center aisle on an airplane with blue seats and a white ceiling; title card for "Vegaboy" by Leah Bailly.

“Don’t live with your hand on the stove.” —Dave Hickey   Emergency Exit When you were barely one year old, I fled to Las Vegas. It’s not like I walked away from my first hit and straight to McCarran. I…

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Graftings by Stella Lei

By | Fiction, Short Stories | March 4, 2022

alt text: image is a color photograph of a peeled orange; title card for Stella Lei's short story "Graftings"

  Hunger never came naturally to me. As a baby, I didn’t cry for milk, preferring to gaze at the mold-splashed ceiling and grab at dust motes, twining my tiny hands through their light. Elaine told me this was because…

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Author’s Note

“Graftings” started with a series of photographs by Luo Yang. They depict a Chinese woman during her pregnancy: her, standing at a window, watching her growing waist; her naked reflection, blurred by glass; her stomach itself, a slash of melanin streaking down its bulge. The images provide a clear jumping off point for the story, unraveling from the mother’s pregnancy and childbirth to the relationships between her, Charity, and Elaine.

Although this piece began with imagery, point of view was also central to its construction. Told in the first person, the story focuses on Charity, who narrates her upbringing from birth to the age of twelve. Notably, she cannot remember her own birth or the early years of her life—her understanding of these events is shaped by her sister, Elaine, and the stories she tells. However, due to the surrealist nature of the premise, Charity cannot know whether Elaine is telling the truth or if she has fabricated a narrative of her own. I wanted to emphasize the secondhand nature of Charity’s story by prefacing sections with “Elaine said” and “according to Elaine.” I used a double filter of unreliable narrators and left the intentionality of their unreliability purposefully vague. Charity herself cannot verify the events of her birth, which is the supposed cause for her mother’s hunger and the reason Charity has none herself. No matter how hard she looks, she never sees a scar on her mother’s stomach. She never finds tangible evidence for her pain. Still, she relays these events to us like they are a concrete truth, an undeniable part of her past.

I especially wanted to consider how easily Charity believes her sister’s stories. She clings to them despite their fantastical nature, highlighting her childlike imagination, her deep trust in Elaine, and her desperation to believe her mother’s cruelty is out of her control. I wanted to ask how a child might filter their parent’s neglect to explain it to themselves. Since young children are less likely to oppose their parents, would ascribing her mother’s violence to the supernatural separate her from her actions? Would it decrease her perceived agency, her ability to do conscious harm? Despite everything, Charity instinctively turns to her mother, watching her from stairwells and doorways, suffused in the shadow of her hunger.

Although this point-of-view framing is merely that—a frame through which the main events are presented—I wanted to peer into Charity’s worldview, her fragile yet desperate construction of her past, and see how she engages with family through it. How she keeps searching for an explanation, how she keeps reaching out, and out, and out.

 

STELLA LEI’s work appears in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Four Way Review, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. Her debut prose chapbook, Inheritances of Hunger, is forthcoming from River Glass Books in 2022. She is an editor in chief for The Augment Review, she has two cats, and she tweets @stellalei04.