Featuring new work by Elinam Agbo, Keyan Bowes, Omar El Akkad, Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto, Amanda Kallis, Heidi Kaloustian, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Caroline Kim, Liu Daohang, Melissa Mogollon, Abbigail Rosewood, Francis Santana, Casey A. Williams, and Olga Zilberbourg. Photography by Nate Kauffman.

A flash fiction piece explores the intriguing process by which a girl “becomes,” how she is simultaneously “made and unmade” by the experiences and influences which surround her.

My mother worked to pay my nanny, who laundered, cooked, and put me to bed, but it was a male omniscience I prayed to, his masculine benediction I longed for.

Then when the house caught on fire and going back only meant standing on a bed of ash and wet grass, we began to transform every place we lived in into our childhood home.

The first time I saw them, more than a decade ago now, they were standing in a circle behind the sun’s shadow. Even from a distance, I could tell they would tower over me, their chins several inches above my head, a mathematical difference in perspective. In their fists, beer, a baseball, throw darts, something crumbling.

I remember being born, the deep red rush, the slippery vessel, the convulsion of tears and sweat, of not-wanting, then suddenly—the light. I don’t remember my mother. In bringing me to life, she’d retracted inside her body, an inversed dahlia, the multiple petals folding into itself.