Rajesh considers himself a man of few exceptions, for he was raised as such. His morning routine requires a piping-hot filter coffee with boiled milk, served in a steel cup inside of a rimmed steel saucer. He then pours…
Order 1989 here! Red Mare Press Barnes & Noble Bookshop.org Amazon Leave a review! Goodreads Church called me a pussy six weeks before tryouts. That’s what I tell his granddaughter, Raquel, who’s sitting across from me in the apartment above…
They called the children night commuters. You used to find this strange, writing fundraising copy at your desk in Sydney, trying to squeeze emotion from dry UN reports. For you, the term conjured up Dickensian images of children going…
Essay by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif • What do short stories have in common with jazz? Like the innately improvisational quality of jazz, the nature of the short story genre—constrained by the need for a high amount of drama in a…
We’d agreed to never come back to this place yet here we are. The wind whispers through the trees and unsettles our hair, trying to remind us to leave. Why would we return to these woods? “I don’t care…
Current Life Situation: Lucrative Work-Assignment, Stable Marriage-Union, Model Son. After daily work-duty, take Municipal Transporter to Metro-Sector T—Genome Modification Center—and receive Target Sequence Update. Then hurry home. Find Model Son (name Theo) at study-station, solving math problem concerning volume…
We haven’t seen her in weeks, our neighbor with white hair that tufts and spumes, not a trace of color in it, not even a sliver of gray. We never learned her name, but we noticed—the way you notice…
“My stepdaughter is a horse.” The school psychologist waits for me to say more, then resumes her review of the pedagogical strategies she and Lilja’s teachers have employed. She speaks at a clip that makes me wonder if her…
I had the pleasure of chatting with Annell López, author of the award-winning debut short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason over coffee after work in New Orleans, where we both live and write. I’ll Give You a…
Elvis Presley’s warbling on the overhead speakers as Mom and I browse a warm, wood-splashed Barnes & Noble. She wants to buy a puzzle for my nephew in Florida. She turns to me. “Oh god, the day Elvis died?…
I grew up loving scary movies. Ghost stories, in particular. To me, what made the stories especially scary was when the setting wasn’t typical, when the scary thing happened in a setting where scary things shouldn’t happen. We all expect ghosts to pound walls or possess people at night, in the dark, but to me, it’s way more terrifying when it happens in daylight. Daylight is for normal, for safe things to happen. Not for ghosts.
It’s where my essay took place that made it so scary for me. I can’t even begin to track how many hours I’ve spent inside bookstores. I’m old enough to remember getting absorbed in long-gone bookshops like Waldenbooks, Borders, and B. Dalton. Everything about them—the sweet tang of the paperbacks, the gentle hum of hushed conversations, the restful colors of the books and their spines facing out on the shelves—made me feel safe. It was the last place I expected to watch my mother, who taught me how to read and love books in the first place, to unknowingly reveal something so potentially insidious. She and I, in a place that was for me very much like a refuge. Right there, in broad daylight. It was the last place I ever thought I’d be horrified.
I pattern a lot of my nonfiction writing around the concept of the “out of place” detail. Like the ghost haunting a house in the daylight, I feel drawn to tell stories where everything seems right, where everything should be right, but something happens that flips it all over. It’s often a small thing, some element that poisons a situation that otherwise wouldn’t be worth writing about at all. My mom being wrong about when Elvis died that day we were shopping in a bookstore was such a small thing, but it pointed at other small things that exploded into a potentially massive, and very terrible, thing. Writing about it isn’t my way of trying to embarrass or call her out. It’s my way of dealing with a ghost in the daylight, my attempt to make it all at least a little less terrifying.
WILL MCMILLAN is a gay writer born and raised in the untamed wild of the Pacific Northwest, where he lives to this day. To date, his essays have been featured in over fifty literary journals, including CRAFT, Autofocus, Bending Genres, and the Atticus Review, among others. He has been nominated for The Best American Essays (listed as a “notable essayist” in 2022 and 2024) and the Pushcart Prize, and is a Best Small Fictions 2023 winner. Find Will on Bluesky @willmcmillan.bsky.social and on Instagram @willmcmn.
