April 15th, 1832
On the second day of our anchorage at the mouth of the Rio Santa Cruz, I led a party of sailors up to the summit of the hill where I’d stumbled upon an Indian grave. Two large...
Gifted Sister
My oldest sister is gifted. When things break, she fixes them. Though often they still don’t work, our parents beam with pride. Sometimes our gifted sister breaks things just to fix them. And our parents beam with pride...
Pangyrus is delighted to feature both a story by the esteemed author E.C. Osondu and a video interview that the author had with Pangyrus Senior Fiction Editor Anne Bernays and Associate Fiction Editor Indu Guzman. The story ("Memory Store")...
The goat was the tricky bit.
The bath had been easy. Her maid hadn’t even thought the request strange.
“The mistress were only brush and petals last May Day,” the maid had said to the cook. “What’s a bath by the...
I wasn't supposed to be in Beirut in December 1993. I certainly wasn't supposed to be in a hotel cafe, drinking thick coffee while a dust storm raged outside. I should have been setting up a stall at the...
Half past noon on a weekday, the middle of summer. Sunny and hot. The flags outside the municipal buildings sway not in the least, which is a way of saying that the air is as still as it can...
The men focus on their poker hands and their glasses of whiskey, preoccupied, as if the saloon is their shared workspace. No one looks up when the new gunslinger swings open the doors and ambles toward the bar like...
The bruised red pickup from the last three weeks meanders up alongside the pumps where I’m stacking oil cans and dodging the night’s slow-moving moths. There’s a chill in the air and soon I’m going to look for my...
1. Mariah gets a temporary job that pays her $1 on Day One. On the second day, her pay is doubled to 2 dollars. Her daily wage doubles every day thereafter, for 30 days. How much money does she...
How long has that bicycle been out there he asks his wife. She’s still seated at the breakfast table, slapping around the morning paper. He’s peering through the bay window at the ten-speed bike chained to a skinny pole...
... And, in the spring— as soon as possible, when the ground was just warming, the snow melting down all the sewers and into the ponds and the reservoir, everything clean and wet and beginning to green— we went...
The night of the first expulsion, I asked the robot in my closet what to do. Usually when I asked him a question about the meaning of life, the universe and everything, he’d respond with something funny like “reply...