Ploughshares

Oct 8, 2024 | pshares.org | Jen Silverman

She got off the train at Hudson and her father was there, tall and resigned, his long hands unraveling the brim of his sun hat as he held it in front of him. She had wondered if she would recognize him right away, but of course she did. The lines in his face had become grooves, and he was baked by the sun, lankier and more muscular than she remembered. She had been ten when she last saw him.

Jul 9, 2024 | pshares.org | Khaddafina Mbabazi |Rebecca Makkai

IIt was possible, Mara discovered, for the smell of one place to cross oceans and airspace. One particular aroma—a drift of leather—had recently become a frequent guest, emerging for the first time in a long time on a cool July afternoon, as she sat on the balcony of her old flat in Bunga. It appeared again one September morning, while she sang a blues song in the shower. And again, days later, at the farm where she tended to her vineyard of citrus and passion fruit.

Jul 9, 2024 | pshares.org | DK Nnuro |Rebecca Makkai

Because of a headache it would turn out I only needed to sleep off, I hadn’t gone to school the day a car struck down Osbert Tetteh. Osbert was the boy I was closest to in class four. I was the girl he was closest to. That day, my mother had waited until ten a.m. before setting off for work—as soon as she was certain sleep would do the trick. I slept until mid-afternoon and then spread out on my stomach on the cool linoleum floor of our living room.

Jul 9, 2024 | pshares.org | Juan Martinez |Juan Martínez |Rebecca Makkai

It is five in the morning in the worst of winter, and I wake up to a knock on the door (we bought the house last year, when everyone who could buy a house was buying a house, and were told to install a buzzer or a Ring or at least a peephole—everyone in the North Shore has one—but we’re never going to), so I look through the front window (basically a giant, two-way peephole), and the person who knocked is also me: Juan, the writer trying to get all this down and tell it to you.

Jul 9, 2024 | pshares.org | Susan Meyers |Rebecca Makkai

If there’s one thing you learn working on a carnival, it’s how to be invisible. Despite all that bling and zip and wow, a carny’s goal is to straddle the distance between spectacle and crowd: to entice people toward the ticket booth, then slip into the background. In my family, it’s a long-standing tradition. Tricksters and circus folk, we’ve made our living on the road for generations, and growing up on that carnival route, I got much more used to being looked at than seen.