In David’s previous life, he was a mad scientist. According to him, I was a lab rat. I’m chopping the remaining half of a watermelon and am more concerned about the ant infestation I had eliminated yesterday because I…
Content Warning—domestic abuse He likes to wear a cowboy hat when he fucks her. She is eighteen, wears her hair traditional—its length snaking down her athlete’s body, a body slowly giving way to womanly curves. She doesn’t know enough…
“The 2024 election will be all about Taiwan,” our boyfriend, Jeremy, says. We’ve turned off all the lights except the one over the stove in the attached kitchen, and now we’re getting high on the plaid sofa in the…
In the gathering dusk of an afternoon that still lingers, I followed my father into the woods. He had not prospered in his first attempt to start a nursery business, the crimson-budded azalea liners withering only days after he…
In Hollows, Tommy Dean’s first full-length flash fiction collection, the narrative lens captures everyday humans at a pivotal moment, where one decision will change everything. Three boys enter the woods carrying a gun. A divorced teacher borrows money from…
By Lee Upton • Probably like many writers I’m protective toward my characters—even though I put them in impossible situations or give them unfulfillable longings. I pretty much pickle them in vulnerability. Sometimes I let them avoid any action…
PROLOGUE: RANA Rana cannot speak. She’s eight years old, but Rana is incapable of yelling out to her sister that a smell—a smell not quite like gasoline spilling from the undercarriage of a rusted out four-wheeler, a smell darker…
This is what you do if he wakes up sad. This is what you do if he comes home angry. This is what you do if he stops taking his medication. This is what you do if he stays…
I followed Horace’s horns as he walked ahead of me into the tearoom. No matter how many times he visited me, I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes off the silky brown pelt of his neck, or the gentle…
One night in college, my roommate Anna and I walked home together from the bus stop. We’d gone downtown to watch a movie, which turned out to be pretty good, and then eaten at a taco truck, which turned…
The seed for this story came from a moment I’ve carried with me since college: early spring, a late night, running into a classmate who thought a man might be following her. Nothing directly happened to me, but for years, I’ve often thought about this memory, which is really someone else’s memory.
According to my Google Drive files, I started this story back in 2019. It went through many iterations as I tried to untangle what exactly it was that haunted me about this memory of a memory. I wrote it in first person, then third person, then a different character’s first person. The whole thing was one long flashback between a mother and a daughter, then all in present tense. I piled up narrative frameworks and then pulled them down in frustration.
But the themes I was drawn to remained constant—the intimacy of female friendships, the potential violence that men can represent, the fears that women share on a primal level. Letting some time pass helped me better understand my own thoughts. The events of 2020, with the pandemic and murder of George Floyd and attacks on Asian Americans—all of that fear and anger—began to inform the story.
It became more apparent to me that the longevity of how the memory haunted me was, in fact, central to the story. We can’t know which events and whose actions will be the ones that will knock us off course or define us—we live as ourselves but also so closely intertwined with and moving and breathing among others. We can’t know if the ones we love and have invested so much of ourselves in will be harmed, we can only try our best and keep running forward.
WILLA ZHANG is a writer from Los Angeles. Her fiction has appeared in The Masters Review, and her nonfiction can be found in The Rumpus and The Sun Magazine. She also interviews Asian-American writers for Hyphen Magazine. More of her work can be found at willazhang.com.
