I first learned of J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague because we share a love for the famed Unicorn Tapestries, a set of unicorn tapestries woven more than 500 years ago, depicting a medieval unicorn hunt. In Sidorova’s novel,…
Christopher Bowen’s forthcoming flash fiction collection, The Things They Forgot to Tell Us When They Left from Cervena Barva Press, features twenty-five compellingly crafted and vastly different stories that all explore vividly realized settings across the American Midwest. Writing…
In Jaclyn Desforges’s aptly titled short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, April 2026), we meet a wide cast of characters that include a ghost, a tarantula caretaker, a mother with five unexplained and well-behaved babies, and telepathic…
The day felt sticky, the low, black sky weighed down with the scent of monsoons. With puddles beneath their feet and shut umbrellas in hands, they shuffled into the building in their damp dhotis and saris, an elevator heaving…
Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario. I was searching for an image of mill tailings. Burtynsky, of course, I thought when I found it. The photograph shows black, barren trees, thin and broken like toothpicks that appear to be…
It’s Inventory Week at Baumgartner Plumbing Supply. Their parents are gone and, for five nights, won’t be home until morning. At nearly sixteen, Heidi has been told she is no longer a child and is therefore old enough to…
The flesh on his arms, like an overripe banana, peels as I drag my nails upward. Ribbons of crimson appear—thin, jagged trails up and down his skin. My brother doesn’t just yell—he shrieks. Not my older brother at all…
Every month or so, a new one would show up in the lingerie department, having flown in by accident through the huge sliding glass doors in Housewares. Celine liked to keep an eye on them, willing them toward the exits…
Two Thirds Terror, One Third Romance On vacations, my father encouraged me to keep travel diaries. These were less diaries than documents—drawings, descriptions, and artifacts recording our movements each travel day. You’ll treasure them when you’re older, he reasoned.…
Kayu Putih, Northeast Jakarta I wake up on New Year’s Day to a world underwater. Or at least it feels that way: the neighborhood has sunken overnight in an opaque brown liquid dotted with moving heads. Two women move…
I started writing “Flood Days” as a work of fiction. I had always wanted to tell this story of leaving my home country, but had never quite figured out how to do so. Every time I recounted the events to friends and family, I shifted the details ever so slightly. I was afraid of exposing myself: my privilege, my opinions, my right to an opinion in the first place as someone with my privilege of leaving. I’d alter my story based on who I was with and how I imagined they would respond to certain details. So when I sat down to write “Flood Days,” I experienced that same instinct—an urge to sanitize parts of the story that cast me in a poor light or felt too pessimistic. I was wrapped up in notions of what a good story was meant to do or the moral framework it was meant to uphold.
What resulted from that first fictional draft was a first-person account of my departure that was in many ways factual, but that to me felt dishonest and flat. It was from writing that draft, though, that I became interested in the metanarrative around storytelling and deception. Why did I dress up or omit certain aspects of the story and not others? Why do any of us do that when we recount our stories?
I decided to turn the story into an essay that directly addresses my deceit. Here, I still write as an unreliable narrator. I fib and elide and mask the same details as in my fictional draft. But I also give space to the deception: what do I instinctively fictionalize, and why?
I’m far from the only person who has experienced the impulse to “clean up” their personal narrative; but there’s a danger in that, too, in the assumption that we need to package our stories to hide the shame and make them palatable to others for our stories to ever be understood. It was my hope that, in telling “Flood Days” as a broader story about storytelling and deception, I’d be able to write with a level of truth that neither pure fiction nor fact-telling would be able to achieve on their own.
MAY TENG is an Indonesian-American writer based in New York. May’s fixations include fragmented narratives, portraits of place, boundaries and borders, and collective memory. Her writing is featured in AGNI and Literary Hub and has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Civil Society Institute, a Periplus fellowship, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. May holds a BA in English from Georgetown University and attended the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Nonfiction Writing, where she taught creative writing. Find her on Instagram @maytengo.
