Two simple enough words if you are a simple enough person.

Saleah Yusuf is a Nigerian writer whose work explores psychological horror, domestic tension, and the quiet fractures within ordinary spaces. Her fiction often centers on the familiar turning strange, drawing from contemporary Nigerian settings and emotional landscapes

What drove him to kill a man?

Thea Yahaya’s first thought when she walked into the Hound & Co. office was that there were too many smiles on the walls.

In the jailhouse of a small town in New Mexico, a rugged man named Porter sits in his cell with his eyes locked on the ground. He focuses on his breathing, inhaling with difficulty through his clogged nose and exhaling out his mouth.

A woman is employed to take care of animals aboard the population transport ship Genesis Six. Every day she feeds all the animals in her section until a strange discovery brings her to question everything.

Google Earth erased my home from its maps. One day it was there, the next day it was gone.

We can only have so many concerns I suppose, by back of the envelope, just a few places at once.

Lucy stepped on an ancient landmine outside Girvetz Hall. I talked to her brother, Suvin, about it as we strolled the beach while the med-techs in the aid center tried to piece her back together. "If it had been one of those new ones, I’m not sure there would be any Lucy left," he said, his eyes drifting to the horizon. "Then again, she hasn't really been 'Lucy' since the winter solstice, has she?" I understood his meaning. Everyone did. Just two weeks earlier, I’d found he

4385 Algoma Place: The first home she shows us is a stunner. A hillside craftsmen in a calm neighborhood.

Artwork by A.R. Tivadar It was a cloudy, early spring morning. Not even roosters were awake yet. Multiple young ladies, chaperoned by parents, grandparents or aunts made their way to a remote manor in the Carpathian mountains. A terrace was set up outside with umbrellas, benches, and appetisers. Older women with elaborate brooches on their coats and peacock feathers in their hats whispered to one another when Mrs Mihaela Ardeleanu, maiden name Codrean

a heart can / growl like a stomach, and be so unsettled. I like the / thin veins like a shadow. like rain / tracing trails on a window, as though it weren't sand.

Missing you is like that. / I carry you around, and you follow me. / The sun rises and sets every day, just as I miss you deeply every day.

My parents’ eyes lock on me the minute I enter the reception hall. A few other head turns and lingering looks shoot my way, undoubtedly due to the show-stopping quality of my dress. Mom picked it out for me at the department store a few weeks ago. I remember struggling to conceal my disgust when a pink, frilly monstrosity you’d think she’d stolen from the closet of a pompous toddler came out of the shopping bag.

“The date’s going fine, right? She’s kinda quiet but whatever, cute girl in a pink dress. No complaints”

My mother told me it was contagious, her proclivity for loneliness. When I was a boy, I couldn’t quite describe that emptiness in the pit of my stomach, that perpetual knot in my throat, that inexorable desire to be a nuisance to those who were sick of my company, that self-hatred knowing that people were, in fact, sick of my company. I was eighteen when she told me, shortly after my aunt passed away. She went to New York for a work trip, and I was left alone, left to my own

i. Träumerei, "Kinderszenen" No. 7; Robert Schumann I was four when I fell in love for the first time. With tender fingers, I traced every one of your lines, black and white smudged slightly with my fingerprints. Naive, my hands caressed your surface like a lover delicately exploring the depths of her beloved’s heart. The world was at my fingertips; you were my world. Your mind lay open before me, a sheet of paper studded with dots and lines and symbols, the genius of all th

The Amber House, Main Hall, 1920s

The bar was eerily empty. I was, unfortunately, the first to arrive, which left me with the task of finding a comfortable enough table for my friends. I looked around as nonchalantly as possible, inexplicably embarrassed as I turned my head right to left, eventually deciding on a large booth in a somewhat desolate corner. I sat down, took out my phone, and tapped absentmindedly, having nothing of importance to look at. After a few minutes, a young woman walked up on the bar’s

In the realm of the Djinn, warmth emanated from apples. Apples were big fireballs that grew on smoky trees whose size, shape, or color never changed. Djinns, who looked like glowing strings, treated these apples as a display in the magnificent orchard and never ate them, because fire was the stuff of life in this realm. Wild stallions ran on open russet plains, where a river of lava flowed from charred mountains and formed a valley. Djinns called it the Valley of the Red. The