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By Owen Thomas
My father told me the story of this big-time gangster from Georgia. The guy ran the streets of Tbilisi but left in the 1990s. He was running from something. He ended up a trash collector on the streets of New York City. I used to imagine this gangster’s thick gloved fingers wrapping around the handles of the plastic bins, lifting them up and flipping them into the back of the truck.
Read MoreBy Cyn Nooney
Tanya says Hollis beat a boy last night. Tanya says the boy crawled through the girl’s bedroom window and good thing Hollis caught him. He beat that boy so hard he soiled himself, Tanya goes on, taking a drag from her cigarette. She saw it with her own two eyes, heard all the whooping and hollering, then the boy curled up beneath the window, jeans streaked with shit. We’re at work when Tanya tells me this. She’s standing near my desk, her back against the easel where I lay out the company newsletter. I’m twenty-three, she’s thirty-eight. She works in purchasing. I’m in PR. Her cubicle is catty-corner to mine. As she talks Tanya adjusts the underwire in her bra with long, tapered fingernails painted the color of strawberry frosting. My boobies are sagging by the minute, she says, Hollis used to spray ‘em all over with whipped cream then slurp up every last bit, but now he never touches them let alone glances their way.
It embarrasses me when she talks like this, but I keep a straight face, so she’ll tell me more. I like to know what’s coming down the pike. She has a young son, Hollis Junior, and a daughter named Mercy who just turned fourteen. Mercy is the one with the window in her room that the boy crawled through.
Read MoreBy Jamie Danielle Logan
She stirs with the movement of the sun. Dawn stretches over the horizon, and she searches for motion amid the brush. Her world appears in shades of gray, with bursts of blue and violet. She cannot see the orange of my vest or the green-brown pattern on my coat, but she can smell my breath in the air. She startles, bounding once, twice, before the breeze decides her fate. It shifts and she pauses next to the lone pine tree, the one that is seventy yards from my small wooden stand. She has just lost the spots of fawnhood. I pull the trigger.
The hunt is humane, my uncle tells me. The population of white-tailed deer in Mississippi is estimated at 1.75 million. It is the highest density in the nation, and only Texas has more deer. In some areas, the herd is still above capacity. A study done in Wisconsin revealed that starvation, non-human predators, and vehicle collision are the top three causes of death for deer, afterhuman hunting. Of these three, none are painless. A bullet to the heart is.
I was sixteen when my uncle first built a deer stand on family land. Deer had begun to appear on our property with increasing frequency. An outdoorsman, he eagerly anticipated teaching his three children this new skill. He convinced my father, his younger brother, to join him. It was decided. My cousins, my brother, and I would learn to hunt. My uncle taught us how to shoot in the summer when the earth was green. We aimed for slabs of cardboard, our mantra ringing louder than the echo of the gun. If it’s brown, it’s down, we said. We did not think of race when we said it, just of victory.
Read MoreBy Sujatha Fernandes
Manuel relayed buckets of moist earth to the concrete stairwell. It was Héctor’s job to hoist the buckets up and ferry them over to the dumpster. They had to work quickly to keep the buckets moving or the Bangladeshi contractor, a slight man with a beard, would start yelling at them, “Taratari koro.”
The workers down below had broken up the existing basement floor of the six-story building with jackhammers and then used pickaxes to pry out the concrete. Now they were excavating eight to ten feet of earth to increase the height of the basement.
Héctor was grateful to work in the open air instead of underground like a mole with the thick damp air and the artificial light from lamps. It was also safer up here. The men in the basement would dig themselves into three-foot-square holes up to eight-feet deep and there weren’t even any planks of wood to brace the sides. Suddenly someone would look up to see the sides crumbling in on him. He suspected that the contractors didn’t know what they were doing. It was only a matter of time before a worker was buried alive.
Still, it was regular work, something Héctor hadn’t had in a while. He had spent several months going to the parada on Roosevelt Avenue, getting picked up occasionally for one- or two-day stints in demolition or renovation. He found this job through Jesús, a slim Oaxaqueño, always clean shaven with dimples and a broad smile. Jesús used to talk big on the corner about his influence in the construction world. The men would rib him. “So why are you here at the parada, dumbass?” It didn’t bother Jesús.
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