They can’t book the baug because they’re a mixed family and the husband hasn’t had his Navjote, but their eight-year-old wants to be like the other children in the colony, so they decide to have a ceremony on the terrace instead. She’s more interested in gifts than prayers, she says, twirling desperately in her polka…
We swam the Tennessee River with your dead eyes open to us, silent within willow fronds on the surface, green tendrils reaching down. Your body hung there, suspended for days. No one knew you, or counted you missing, or turned the shore end over end to discover your ending. It was an accident – finding…
Canticle for University Parks, Oxford When the sun finally breaks and the air is soft and muggy enough to swim in and the sidewalks are cracking from foot traffic and the brutalism of Wolfson is weighing on the soul you will find us between willows older than God, along the forearm of the River Cherwell,…
When I make my way back to the edge of my earth, it is here that I fold myself between moist graduals, in search of grounding where I cry out to the waves please wash me of this series of mistakes each one withdrawing as I inch my naked feet near receding elegantly into the mammoth…
Of Course You Can Go Home Should the seasons mistake themselves for wolves circling faster, and the sun chase the moon around the center of the universe ten thousand times an hour and should the sky be scribbled bright still it is so long until an ending and should knees always joint up, heel to…
my friend’s inflatable trampoline floats in her backyard cove. black mesh swallows the sun and bites at our bare skin till we fill our hands with lake water and douse our tethered island in it. we’re playing sirens again. not exactly mermaids – the estranged cousin, maybe, of that sort of nymph. in lieu of…
gut grief there’s an older man, i know, who sleeps among this thicket with a face like mine, eyes like mine, corporeal form curled behind the curtain of shadow at the heart of spiderweb oak. i have seen the night turn over in its sleep, a wide black, no forgiving star to cut the even…
In Issue 13 of Apeiron Review, we published “Years Later” by author Sieghard Jian, the story of a social scientist volunteering for an NGO to educate a village of sex workers about HIV/AIDS. The truth is that Mrs. Zhao chooses this line of work to further her academic goals and conduct research, but thanks to some scolding from her…
In Issue 15 of Apeiron Review, we featured “In Flight” by Henry Dane, the tale of a young boy who is forced to live with his cold, no-frills uncle after a fatal car accident. The two eventually move to Colorado in order to build a flying machine as a condition of a special inheritance, and we…
Let me get this out of the way up front: don’t ever start a short story with depressed college students smoking cigarettes and drinking in a shitty bar where they end up having bad, emotionless sex with a stranger, all while bemoaning the meaninglessness of life and their lack of personal agency. Now if this…