If Holly put a penny in a gum ball machine, gum and a gold plastic ring would come out. At the Holy Names carnival, she’d lay a poker chip on a number, watch the wheel spin, and collect a stuffed animal.“I swear, you are the luckiest kid,” her mom...
Fiction
Kill All the Bats
Fifteenth day under lockdown, twenty-second in self-isolation, and I had already lost most of my muscles. Not that I was a wrestler before that. Not even a fan of that violent sport. Sports like wrestling are based on fake hatred. And fake or...
The Lizard
The lizard was trapped between the glass door and the screen. Its long, crooked body and small head couldn’t hide the sight of my dry backyard. Yet the lizard was all I could see. A lizard, my sole companion in these strange days of isolation and...
Coping on the Upper West Side
The building is filled with old ladies, some with walkers, some with aides, and many who manage quite well on their own. They are mostly widows, wearing sensible shoes from Harry’s, lots of black puffer coats, and carrying New Yorker shopping bags...
Strange Times
The Last Time Things Were Normal The last time things were more or less normal, I got a haircut. Or rather, a trim. There was no particular reason for it. I woke up, noticed the dullness of the dark, wiry strands wrapped in a bun, felt the...
A Standing Offer
Jack has a job. It’s the sort of job where he doesn’t get to tell many people what to do or what not to do. Say he’s a travel agent or an insurance claim adjuster or a legal clerk, and he’s probably quite good at whatever this job is. Presume that...
Dream Girl
“Don’t look now.” I turned to the window and saw a Mercedes parked in the lot. My heart sank. “I told you not to look.” My roommate Romina rolled her eyes—at what, it was always hard to tell. “That thing’s probably worth two years of tuition. So...
The Day Bahlul Died
Our convoy got back to COP Bowri Tana around 6 pm. The sun was falling and seemed to light the horizon on fire. As we marched from the flight line, I spotted six local nationals, Afghans, praying under the canopy next to the TOC. They were kneeling...
Twenty Thousand Cedis
The day the wind came down and brought rain, we were hanging on a guava tree along the hospital road. Our backpacks were filled with fruits. The wind was strong and pushed a cow herd our way. In the distance, the hot steam mixed with dust, and the...
Winner, Editors’ Choice in Fiction: Chiarascuro
In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s third anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our third annual Editors’ Choice Awards, selected from among the works we published in 2019. Jordan Dotson’s “Chiarascuro” is the...
Rion Amilcar Scott Is an MC’s MC: An Interview by Reginald Dwayne Betts
Rion Amilcar Scott is an MC’s MC. He creates the kind of imaginative landscapes that seem so real you wonder why you haven’t been paying attention to the world in the way that he has. But I gotta confess. I slept on his first book; the collection of...
Paper People
No child wanted to be sent to The Shredder. It hid in a concrete, windowless structure several blocks from the car towing company, the chicken factory farms, and the E-waste recycling centers. That was where the unwanted kids went: the kids who...
A Man at the End of the Hallway
Early in the morning the hallways of the Cancer Institute were so empty and quiet, they seemed nowhere near the crowded city of Belgrade, but in another world. While Slavka cleaned the gray linoleum floor, she felt she was navigating a giant...
The Brexit Bus Stop 31.10.2039
I waited for the bus. The first bus didn’t arrive for a while. I waited beneath a blood-red sun, sweating and exhausted. It was the first time in twenty years that I’d stood at a bus stop; the last time was on the last day of October in 2019. Brexit...
First Day Back
I don’t hear the shots anymore , but I can still feel them. I feel them in every movement; each thought and perception is formed by them. I feel quite a lot, at the most dangerous times. Walking into school today, I noticed how the green and...
CHIAROSCURO
Minutes on trains are longer than rivers. This, Chiara knows. It’s only two hours from Naples to Rome, but gazing at the grasses and soft vanilla clouds, it feels as if years have passed. Chiara sighs at the glass.“Are you sure we can’t go swimming...
One million puppets (or more)
Take a look at this doll, said the puppeteer, indicating one of the many homunculi scattered onstage. Take a look at this doll and try to mistake it for someone you know, anyone made of flesh and blood, perhaps a friend or a relative. Take a look at...
Dendrochronology
When the knock sounds, she knows she’s not to open the door. Her father has warned about these woods and their inhabitants. The expedience with which the knock travels through the little house reminds her that she is alone in a box made of wood. She...
Certain Angles
Becka stretched out flat on the warm driveway, her arms and legs moving up and down on the asphalt, as if making an angel. She wondered what it would be like to have her friends over, make Jiffy Pop, and watch TV. Some of the other families in the...
Please Leave a Message After the Tone
1. Hello, this is June Finley of the Internal Revenue Service calling for Dawn and Bill Cramer. I am calling because we have discovered a significant problem with your federal income tax return. To correct this problem, you must call us back...
An Interview with Johannes Lichtman
Scoundrel Time’s Robert Anthony Siegel talks with Johannes Lichtman about his first novel, Such Good Work. Johannes Lichtman’s beautiful first novel, Such Good Work, follows a protagonist named Jonas, a Swedish-American dual national who leaves...
An Interview with Roxana Robinson
Scoundrel Time’s Robert Anthony Siegel talks to Roxana Robinson about her new novel, Dawson’s Fall Roxana Robinson’s sixth novel, Dawson’s Fall, is based on the lives of her great-grandparents, Francis and Sarah Dawson, members of Charleston, South...
The Collector
When I was nine years old, a woman came to our house. I was alone. My parents were at work, or on some obscure mission concerning allotments or storage units. Our house was piled with junk, which they described as temporary, just until the building...
Bananas for Sale
The bananas were rotting on the factory floor outside of St. Petersburg. In early October, the temperature inside the nearly abandoned building held at just above freezing, too cold for the tropical fruit. Banana skins were greying, developing dark...
An Atlas of Reds and Blues: An Interview between Ellie Paolini and Devi Laskar
An Atlas of Reds and Blues is a novel that spans a handful of critical minutes—as well as a lifetime—for its protagonist. As she lies in her own driveway in suburban Georgia, bleeding out from a gunshot wound inflicted by an officer of the law, the...
Winner, Editors’ Choice Award in Fiction: Allegiance
In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s second anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our second annual Editors’ Choice Awards. Lorraine Rice’s “Allegiance” is the award-winner in fiction. Here is what Fiction Editor...
Say His Name
Joe Bishop’s high school English teacher posts on Facebook that the body cam footage of his death is no better than a snuff film, and the cop responsible should go to prison for murder. This post ends her relationship with her sister and several of...
An Interview with Chaya Bhuvaneswar
Scoundrel Time’s Elisabeth Booze talks to Chaya Bhuvaneswar about her work Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s debut short story collection White Dancing Elephants was praised by Laura Van Den Berg as “powerfully intelligent prose.” Lauren Groff calls her a “bold...
First Gods
They had the number, Lalita divined. Now, sitting with her father and mother at the restaurant, looking at her father’s face, its flat surface smugly composed for once, instead of explosive with rage, Lalita was sure of it. Her parents, having never...
Catfight at the Polling Place: November, 2018
We had been standing in line for hours. Days. Months. It felt like we had been standing since the beginning of thought or reason, for centuries. Some of us had been waiting, every hour, every minute, for two years. The waiting, the desire to vote...
Allegiance
By the time I made it to the school bus, there was one seat left, the one next to Candy. I scanned each row again until Freddy the bus driver, pink and patchy face fuzz, yelled “Take a seat!” Then, a little lower, “Next time you better hustle, girl...
Catch and Release
A lonely trout swam in circles among the pebbles in the shallows of the lake, murmuring about fillets. She knew it was unhealthy and pointless to dwell on morbid fantasy. Yet she could not forget. Her nightmare recurred. True, it was a happy fact...
The Ashen Light
It was July and James, my husband of four months, and I had just driven straight through from Oregon to Chicago. I had lined up a second-year summer internship at a cat hospital in Chicago so that when I graduated from Oregon State’s veterinary...
A Cloud Like a Person Standing Upside Down
This story was inspired by a Chinese news report. For decades, the town on the Yangtze River in southern China had been known for its two kinds of clouds. There were the black clouds billowing out of five big chimneys of a cement factory on the...
Competition
He knelt on the ice and watched his brother Craig skate the wide oval they had cleared off the flood. On the straights, Craig crouched and stretched and pulled with one arm then the other, his crocheted scarf trailing out behind, then glided into...
After Math
Geniuses The boys always planned to be geniuses. Papers spread over the tabletops, numbers on screens. Their gaze has missed something. The girl in a box in the darkness of the closet, hands folded, trinkets worn round her neck motionless. Once...
The President is Missing
We think he is somewhere in the White House, but we cannot find him. He was last seen wearing his robe, watching television in the presidential sitting room, flipping through news channels, pausing occasionally upon seeing his likeness. Many of us...
The Body Confesses
We were so young, my sister and I, both of us still wearing dresses that showed our grubby knees. I don’t know why we joined the crowd that followed our father, who was acting again on one of his “feelings” when he led us to the abandoned...
Invisible Theater
Not long after the Loma Prieta earthquake, our collective decided to stage an Invisible Theater performance in the atrium restaurant of a grand hotel in San Francisco’s Financial District. When Eva and I walked in, she nodded to our brother...
How It Ends: After Trump
Come and see. A red-haired woman dances barefoot on the asphalt on one side of the street. An elderly man with a cane tries to keep up with her and bursts into laughter as he almost loses his balance. Two olive-skinned young men make music with...
How It Ends: Last Words
The presidential bedroom is covered in gold leaf and glimmers dimly in the predawn darkness. The President is in bed. He reaches out of the golden comforter for the remote. On the giant screen, a man sits beside a woman at a translucent desk. The...
How It Ends: The House
The sponge on the counter reeks faintly and the kitty-cat clock is stuck at 10:05, such a non-time, morning or night, it doesn’t matter. The whole house is like a bad belly, swollen with gross nostalgia: the old-timey radio, the Formica table, the...
How It Ends: Downward Muslimah
When they came for me, I wasn’t expecting it. Every day since the election, I’ve felt just a little less safe, but I never thought they’d actually round us up. Even after the ban, I still had hope. I’m an American citizen, an attorney who knows what...
How It Ends: Unspeakable
I told Ina I would never speak to her again. We had been friends of a sort since our twenties—hung out in the same bars, showed up at feminist rallies and marches together—but she was increasingly one of those politicos who find fuel for neurotic...
How It Ends: How the Best of Us Goes
Tell me the story again, the boy says sitting before a cold, dusty fireplace. His father sighs. How many times have I told you the story? the father says. You’re too old for the story. It’s something I told you because the world didn’t make sense...
How It Ends: The Trump Mothers Speak
And then, finally, we descended: tens of thousands of women in America, coming to the White House trying to take back the country. We were all dressed as Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, the mother of Donald Trump. We came from every state, from...
How It Ends: #ThemToo
In the video—because there are cameras in every room of that house—he’s walking ahead of her down the stairs and then, perhaps sensing she isn’t following, reaches behind him for her hand. He does it without turning and so he...
How It Ends: Inside the Trump Museum
It’s afternoon outside the Trump Museum, and a small crowd of people has entered the park gates and are surging toward the left entrance. There are always so many more people when the Women’s Brigade are in charge of security, recognizable by their...
How It Ends: What Comes Next
For the light of heart: dancing cat emojis and Grumpy Cat GIFS. For the TV-obsessive: war on North Korea. For the New Year’s Resolutionist: lobster truffle mac n cheese at Dean and Deluca’s: I’ve always wanted to taste this. I don’t know how...
How It Ends: But Her Emails
Following his conviction for money laundering, racketeering, assault, fraud, obstruction, and treasonous plotting with foreign entities, the current White House squatter will be tossed out of the building along with his portraits (those fake Time...
Winner, Editors’ Choice Award in Fiction: My First Friend
In celebration of Scoundrel Time’s first anniversary, our editorial team is excited to announce the winners of our first annual Editors’ Choice Awards. Maria Saba’s story “My First Friend” is the award-winner in Fiction. Here...
The Blanket Room
—After Italo Calvino and Dorianne Laux When I’m inconsolable, I like to go to The Blanket Room™. A new one just opened at the Maple Heights Mall. They wrap you in a blanket and turn out the lights. Then someone comes in, brushes the hair from your...
Drops Vanish
I remember very little of my childhood, and less as I grow older, each memory lingering like drops of dew on a mirror dropped, forgotten, in a garden. What do I remember? I remember my brother’s feet beside my face as they pumped up and down against...
Exclusive Service
Tom had built up some sort of callus so the leg shackle didn’t bother him as much as it used to. Also, the Team had been very accommodating when he asked for the chain to be lengthened. Those few inches meant he could reach the bathroom, so he felt...
Into that Dark Room Where the Fiction Gets Made: An Interview with Novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz
Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of six novels including a personal favorite of mine, The White Rose, a contemporary take on the opera Der Rosenkavalier. Jean’s latest novel, The Devil and Webster, follows the journey of Naomi Roth, a college...
Describe Hope: Assignment Given to Undergraduate Creative Writing Class on November 9, 2016
The Professor rushes into a small university classroom. Twenty students sit around a large wooden table. The professor is ten minutes late; she appears rattled and as though she has not slept. Professor: Class. So. Hello. I know we have many...
Welcome to My Highway
It was her last day, the last hours she’d spend a full night in that box. The gel on her chapped hands, the roar of traffic from the E-ZPass lanes. Was she ever really here? In a matter of time even the memory of the tollbooth would lose the smell...
Square Fictions
Around the time of the election, I started writing mostly square fictions about the president-elect. It began with one a day, then went to two, then three, then more. They were short because he has (we are told by many who know him) a small...
Shuffle Off
There was a time where I was breaking a lot of things I’d fixed, which is to say I was wasting second chances. I smoked myself right out of a position when the regional manager caught me puffing in the stockroom. Then when I found a job at a...
Post-Election, With the Mothers in the Zombie Parking Lot
They have not arrived. You are waiting for them. The parking lot is dark and it is November, so your arms feel hard and fragile in the cold. It is nine o’clock, and you are all gathering here to send your children off on a field trip. The bus is...
How the World Really Feels About You
Extremely talented, good-looking, intelligent. You were light on your feet, unafraid to kiss a lady’s hand if she looked like she needed it, the picture of judiciousness and reserve. You would never choose our brothers over us, nor would you ever...
Any Humans Here?
Earlier, in a bar on La Brea, some kid had stared him down. Six-thirty on a Wednesday, not quite (not yet) the dinner hour, and rain flecked the small square windows of the place in dots of light. He’d been with an old friend, small mercy of the...