THE WASHERWOMAN: HEENALI PATEL
Janita had brought Oscar up to this clifftop before. He had just about come to her hips then, and he clung to the hem of her parka like a barnacle stuck to a rock. “Mummy I’m hungry,” he said over and over. They’d ...
Author: editor
ISA: ALISON ISAAC
“I love you like cooked food?” “No, I mean for real.” “I love you like a fat kid loves cake?” “Fine, forget it then,” Isa said, getting up from the couch in Jabari’s condo. If there were anything Isa didn’t like about him, it was ...
EDITOR’S LETTER: ZAHRAH NESBITT-AHMED
This is the first issue of REWRITE READS. What can I say? We didn’t have a theme for our launch issue, but the writers were encouraged in their submissions to rewrite the narrative. The nine stories in REWRITE READS #1 do that in ...
THE NAMING CEREMONY: GURMEET KAUR
They were at it again. It was the stickiest day of April – fireworks and praying palms intermingled in the heat as the celebrations of Vaisakhi closed in on Bata 2, Gali No. 12, Ganesh Nagar, New Delhi, 110092. Two floors of ...
LEGACY: ALISON ISAAC
I was four when I saw my father cry for the first time. He came to pick my brother and me up from our place in Kingston, Ontario, to take us back to Toronto to spend some time with him. Toronto was about three hours away and Mom wasn’t ...
HOME: HANA
I am a watch – an impressive one at that. The kind that does not tick or tock. Her father picked me up from the jewellers on Mansour Street, the only place in town that you would have found me back then. You could never buy one ...
FOUNDER’S LETTER: CHRISTINA FONTHES
11/11/2019 So much of what we’ve been taught about literature, about writing, has come from people who do not look like us. When we see ourselves in the books that we read, it is often a very limited experience – it is about a ...
TREE PEOPLE: FRANCES OGAMBA
“Shh. They will hear you.” “They won’t. Nne says they never hear us.” Oma and I are perched on the tail of a leaf on the outskirts of the tree’s walls. The leaf gives a slight sway beneath our weight. Our eyes sweep in the sea of ...
HEARTS & SHADOWS: MISSY MILLS
Leslie stood in front of me damn near-nude, wearing a pair of sheer black panties and her bloody heart. I assumed Leslie was speaking metaphorically when she said she wanted no barriers between us. Yet, here she was in my bedroom ...
THE PUGILIST TREE: TERESA FOWLER
As I think back to how I viewed my dad when I was a kid, I remember he seemed to me to be as majestic and intimidating as a Canadian Sequoia. I knew for sure at that tender age that he was the tallest, strongest, oldest thing in the ...