Chasing Flowers

by L. Chan

Lian’s world is flat. Not just the landscape, which extends as far as the eye can see, horizon to horizon under the rolling twilight flux. Not just the houses, dotting the slate grey earth and the thunder cloud sky. Not just her folded servants, who used to pad around silently with their painted smiles and their unblinking eyes, unfurling from their hiding places to bring her the same dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a hundred years.

Lian ate regularly for fifty years before she realised that the food tasted of nothing but fire and ashes. Before she realised that she wasn’t hungry and had never been since her death. Not down here, where the sun peeks over the hills at the edge of the land and she still doesn’t know if it’s rising or setting because it’s been stuck there for the hundred years since she died.

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When You Find Such a Thing

By Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Yes, I know meeting my girlfriend’s parents wasn’t on my to-do list for the next few forevers, but it happens that Gbemi is the slyest babe I’ve dated, so I should’ve known, ba? One minute we’re off on a supposed spontaneous getaway weekend she planned for us; next thing, I’m sitting under the dining chandelier at her parents’ Lekki duplex, struggling to explain to her father what I do for a living.

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The Fall Shall Further the Flight In Me

By Rachael K. Jones

There are things that fly and things that fall. You must remember this distinction, because they are not the same.

Devils are flying things that learn to fall. Lovers are falling things that learn to fly. Do not confuse them.

Saints do not fly, precisely, although they may seem to as they bear our prayers up the sky. They merely learn not to fall. It takes long years of repentance to master this art, and even then, some saints fall anyway, like my mother did.

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The White Fox

by L. P. Lee

Five days have passed since I was a prisoner in those red brick walls, but every night I return there. In my night time terrors I am back in the squalor of that cell, surrounded by anguished people, so cramped that you can barely sit comfortably, let alone lie down to sleep. Cells without heat in the harsh Seoul winters, or cool relief in the sweltering summers; breeding grounds for exhaustion, frost bite and death.

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