A Man Who Prays with His Gun I wanted to write a Galkaiyo story about goats in a mosque, about a man walking into that same mosque with his AK-47, setting it down before him to pray, and how I’d look back a few years later, thinking: “Did you come to pray for the sake…

by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor It’s true what they say, though acknowledging this doesn’t make it easier to accept: sometimes you can’t go home. I was exiting a toxic relationship, searching for a place within my friendships, and for the first time in my life wondering who I was, worrying it wasn’t who I believed myself to…

The Loneliest Numbers are One and Infinity In New York your image is captured thousands of times a day. The red eyes of cameras hide under awnings and in subway tunnels, above storefronts and at busy intersections. Even if you escape their scrutiny you can’t avoid the eyes of fellow subway passengers, the glass walls…

A Black Eye. A Drowned Eye.   It begins with a sore throat. Trouble swallowing. An abscess. Then an enormous bloodshot eye growing out of the abscess and overtaking the rest of her. She is very peculiar! Her husband is furious that he can’t understand what she is looking for. Though her pupil widens like…

by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor I’ve long been drawn to the idea of ghosts. At first, I was fascinated by the ghost as symbol: what it means to have something hanging over your head or within your psyche. How you are haunted by what you do and don’t do, by what happens to you. Something from our…

WHERE BABIES COME FROM: Spare Parts The store specializes in spare parts for second-hand children. They stock baskets full of hair, jars filled with different types of glee, a couple binders of childhood collecting obsessions. We run our fingers through bins of button noses, uncork carboys of sibilant cries, and consider whether baseball cards, bugs,…

What We Will Be Expecting   At the last session of the birthing class we learned about all the ways the baby would try to die. As if it hadn’t already been trying its whole gestation. The second you stopped worrying about miscarriage, preterm labor, stillbirth, you could look forward to worrying about SIDS and…

by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer: what it does, how different people practice it, if it works. Mostly, I’d like to know why it worked for me for so many years, then it didn’t. I cannot place the moment it happened, but over time, when I bowed my head to pray,…

Del Rio, TX Something in my stomach says nothing wants to live here, especially not childhood. We wake to taxidermied turkeys on the cabin wall. Eric’s dad, Donnie, cracks open a beer and a dozen eggs. Donnie says, Eat. We eat. Donnie says, Let’s go. We go.   We ride four-wheelers past barbed-wire fences. Circle…

Regions of Red The grandma had scabies. The itching started in her toes and traveled up her body, leaving blisters and scabs in its wake as it forced its epileptic trek onward—a devil’s tango in bas-relief. Soon the mites would reach her thighs and submerge into their warmth. The grandma’s only son took care of…