Spanning diverse nationalities and races, the protagonists in our stories are unified by their search for love against the odds. Set in Taiwan and Ireland, as well as told by Indian American, Black American, and White American protagonists in the United States, these stories center on the struggle to repair fractured relationships or forge meaningful ones. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.
Full of compassion and unexpected turns, Vaidhy Mahalingam’s “The Vandal” follows a blunt speaking, middle-aged Indian woman who navigates the difficulties of her life with verve and humor. “The fog hasn’t rolled in this summer evening and Charu rather enjoys the warm weather during her half-hour walk from the Berkeley Downtown BART station to the Krishna temple. As she enters the temple and slips off her shoes, she finds it amusing that she has made this trip wearing a sari. Such courage!”
Recounted by an unreliable narrator, Darren Huang’s “White Jade” offers a nuanced portrayal of the dysfunctional relationship between a mother, her sister, and her daughter. “The trouble began three days ago when Tingting had stopped answering Betty’s calls, messages, then emails. For two days, before she arrived at the high school where she taught orchestra, Betty had waited outside Tingting’s pharmacy clinic. Then she had visited her daughter’s favorite beef noodle shop after lunch, and her apartment in the evenings.”
“Likes and Dislikes” by Mars Robinson is a wild, sensuous love story between a human and part-human creature. “Margot never liked her name, which was unfortunate because she was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting to hear it. Margot. She sounded like a huffy bulldog of a woman. One of them red-cheeked girls, hiding thin spots in their head with fat curls, with wagon-dragging hips, thick pie-making arms, and hotdog fingers shaking ash off a long cigarette. That is what Margots was like to her. Most importantly, Margots always came white, not just white but white, made a casserole and bitter koolaid for her two-point-five children white.”
Julie Petrini’s “Boulders” is a poignant love story told with humor, grace, and regret by a woman who remembers a relationship with a young man she kept at arm’s length. “I remember I was at the end of a long twisted phone chord in a corner of my parents’ front hall when you first asked me out the summer before we went to college. You said I’d like to take you to Houlihan’s for dinner, knowing I liked the booths in the back that were shrouded by plastic vines and noisy strands of beads.”
Glass Half Full By Phil Cummins explores love and sex in its mid-to-late stages, told also with humor and regret, in this case by an Irishman. “No spring chicken, he’d lately been experiencing some problems in the downstairs department. Notwithstanding nebulous cramps in the bones of the pelvis and a gradual weakening of the bladder at nights, he’d also registered a noticeable decline in his sexual application. A growing source of concern to Gearóid, it wasn’t long before Margaret started in at him to make an appointment with Doctor Folan.”
Lee Hope and Karen Halil, co-fiction editors
Lee Hope, is the author of the novel Horsefever, a finalist in the Midwest Book Awards. She is a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, and a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship for Fiction. She has published stories in numerous literary journals such as Witness and The North American Review. She founded and directed a low-residency MFA program and has taught at various universities. She also teaches for Changing Lives Through Literature, which serves people on probation and parole.
Karen Halil is a writer of Armenian and Lebanese heritage from Turkey. Born in Canada, she has since become American and now lives in the Greater Boston area. Holding a Ph.D. in English literature, she is a former lecturer at Boston University’s Writing Program and Harvard’s Committee on Degrees in History and Literature. Her earlier short stories and poetry can be found in Canadian literary magazines, and she is currently seeking publication of her debut novel.
