Andy Cox let me know that he was buying my magical realism piece “The Angel at the Heart of the Rain” for publication in a future issue of Interzone. Always happy to be published in this magazine 🙂

Many thanks to Dom Conlon, Scott Kennedy, Christina Vasilevski and Glen Mehn for the crits–and to the usual suspects Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Tricia Sullivan for the invaluable encouragement and feedback.

Snippet:

At first, you believe it is only a matter of time until your aunt joins you. You huddle in a small flat with your younger sister Huong and two other refugees, washing rice that smells only faintly of jasmine, cutting ginger that has grown hard and tasteless in the cupboards where it was hoarded like treasures–and you think of a home so far out of your reach it might be on another planet.

On the phone, your aunt’s voice is breezy, telling you not to worry–that she’ll find a visa and a plane ticket, that she knows someone who knows someone who can give her a hand with the formalities of the High Commission for Refugees. Behind her, you hear the dull thud of bombs falling like rain on a tin roof–the same sound that swells and roars within your dreams until you wake up in a room that feels deathly silent.