For our twentieth annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked five established authors to introduce this year’s group of debut writers. Read the July/August 2020 issue of the magazine for interviews between Ashleigh Bryant Phillips and Lauren Groff, Jean Kyoung Frazier and Bryan Washington, Corinne Manning and Paul Lisicky, Megha Majumdar and Sue Monk Kidd, and John Fram and Sarah Gailey. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut novels.

Sleepovers (Hub City Press, June) by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
Pizza Girl (Doubleday, June) by Jean Kyoung Frazier
We Had No Rules (Arsenal Pulp Press, May) by Corinne Manning
A Burning (Knopf, June) by Megha Majumdar
The Bright Lands (Hanover Square Press, July) by John Fram

Sleepovers
Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

Ashleigh Byran Phillips.jpg

The Truth About Miss Katie

I didn’t like it when I heard what Miss Katie said at her going away party. And I probably shouldn’t have been listening but I wanted to tell her goodbye. At the party she said, “Excuse me I have a phone call,” and then she didn’t come back in for a long time so I went out to the bleachers where she always talks on the phone because she says that’s where she has best reception and I wish I didn’t hear her. What she said. She didn’t know I was there. And that was rude I guess and not good manners but Miss Katie is my favorite person—or was—because she’s smart and pretty and always has her nails done nice and she told me that one time that my bush baby I did was looking so cute in the bush.

I had never done art before, I mean I’d seen it on TV like on Disney Channel and the Miley Cyrus show when she had to do a thing called a self-portrait. But that’s why I loved when Miss Katie came. I just wanted to try art. You hear about it in all the stories, people painting, looking at paintings. I know that paintings are in museums because the library book I checked out told me about it. I’ve never been to a museum before either.

I heard that in the 6th grade we can go see a museum on the big field trip that the 6th graders take. They take us up to UNC to see the basketball court where Michael Jordan played and then they take us to a museum. We got to raise money to get up there though because we have to get this real big bus to take us and you have to get there real early at six in the morning and you CAN NOT be late. Or you’ll be holding up your friends!

So I wanted to do this art. And I had never heard of a bush baby before either until Miss Katie came and read us that story about Africa and she showed us how to draw animals from Africa in white crayon on white paper. And I know that sounds crazy because how are you gonna see anything with white crayon on white paper? But when you put the watercolor on it, it shows up really good. Well like I said, Miss Katie said I did so good on my bush baby, “Pretty eyes,” she said. “Between you and me it’s the best one in the class.” And that made me feel good.

When I got my period I thought I was hurt and I didn’t know what was happening to me and I was crying in the bathroom stall at school and Miss Katie came in there and told me I was okay. She said I should be proud, that it meant I was becoming a young lady. She said she had one too. And she gave me a pad to put in my panties. And when Grandma picked me up from school that day Miss Katie walked out with me to Grandma’s car and held my hand and she said, “Your granddaughter got her period today at school and I hope I didn’t overstep my boundaries or anything but she didn’t know what was going on and she was scared…” And then Grandma interrupted her and said, “That girl needs to feel scared.” I could tell Miss Katie didn’t know what to say then.

My Grandma is the bossy type. More bossy than Miss Katie. She don’t let us keep the lights on at night because of the electric bill and so when the sun goes down me and brother and sister sit in our room in the dark just talking to each other and sometimes my baby sister is afraid and I hold her and scratch her back real light like you’re barely touching her to get her to go to sleep. You can’t do it too hard or it won’t work. And Grandma won’t send me to school but with one pad. She says they’re expensive. So I told Miss Katie and she brought some pads to school just for me. And now whenever I feel the blood coming out of me I can change pads as much as I want. I hate feeling like I’m sitting in my own blood.

But Miss Katie said that I was a smart girl, a curious person, and that meant I was exciting. Miss Katie says to be normal is one of the most boring things in life. She taught us paper ma-shay. She has a paper ma-shay of her boobs that she keeps in her desk, she showed it to me one time.

She said I was a real artist. She really liked everything I’d paint. “Good color choice,” that’s something she always said. She said that on my self-portrait. That’s also when she told me I was beautiful. “See,” and she pointed to my face and said, “This is just beautiful.”

Miss Katie made me want to be a teacher. She taught me so much. And I wanted to tell her goodbye. I wanted to tell her how nice I think she is and thank her for all she’s done and ask her if she thinks we’ll ever see each other again.

I wanted to give her a gift. I wanted to paint her a painting. A thing called a still life, of opening spring flowers, but she never even got around to staying around here long enough for me to see any spring flowers open. And I didn’t want to ask Grandma for a canvas. Grandma wouldn’t even let me explain what a canvas was. She said, “None of that mess.”

So I stole some paper from school and did a self-portrait at night in my room in the dark. I had to try it over and over again for a while like that until it came out good. Because I couldn’t really see what all I was doing, but I got the hang of it after a while. And that’s what I wanted to give her, the self-portrait I did, because it had gummy worms on it, floating around my head.

Miss Katie asked me what was my favorite restaurant and I said that even though I love McDonald’s, and McDonald’s has toys ‘cause my cousin Terri works there and she brings them to us from her work, I have never been to the Golden Corral. I’ve seen the commercials and I don’t even know where it is around here but the TV says that the Golden Corral is all you can eat—it’s buffet. Kayla says she’s been there and that buffet means the food never goes out. You can eat until you’re so full you’re about to pop. Kayla says if I ever go, to try the BBQ pizza. She says you wouldn’t think it, cause it sounds gross, but she says it’s so so good.

Miss Katie said she’d never gone to the Golden Corral, but she said that she’d take me someday. I told her I heard we can put candy on our ice cream there. “I’m sure,” she said. She said she’d put gummy worms on her ice cream. And I just wanted to know if she could tell me when I went out to the bleachers to find her and give her my self-portrait when we were going to go to the Golden Corral.

But when I got out there, I saw her on the phone and I didn’t want to interrupt. I listened behind the gym, heard her talking some real bad stuff. She was saying, “This place is a shit hole.” And, “I’m just so alone here.” And she told her friend that we’d made her a 7Up cake. Miss Katie was kinda laughing then. She said she spit the cake out in the bathroom. She said 7Up cake was some country shit.

I can’t believe she said that. I mean she told us that she loved the 7Up cake. And it really is so good. We never get it except only on special occasions when Sammy’s mama makes it. We all love it so much when she makes it. It’s my favorite cake.

Miss Katie said the swimming pool here doesn’t even have a diving board. I’d never thought about that before, but she said it so mean. And she said she was scared of getting robbed. She was shaking her head and getting frustrated. “Yeah, you’re right,” she said. “Helping. Yes. They needed me.” Yeah she did show us things, but I never knew that we needed any help.

Miss Katie started crying on the phone and I remembered my sister. She’d be crawling into the fridge at night when she was hungry, when she won’t supposed to be looking for something to eat. It hurt my feelings to hear Miss Katie talk like that. And I want to tell her that I don’t ever want her to come back here again because I hate her.

Excerpted from Sleepovers by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips. Published by Hub City Press. Copyright © 2020 by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips. 

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Pizza Girl
Jean Kyoung Frazier

Her name was Jenny Hauser and every Wednesday I put pickles on her pizza.

The first time she called in it’d been mid-June, the summer of 2011. I’d been at Eddie’s a little over a month. My uniform polo was green and orange and scratchy at the pits, people would loudly thank me and then tip me a dollar, at the end of shifts my hair reeked of garlic. Every hour I thought about quitting, but I was eighteen, didn’t know how to do much of anything, eleven weeks pregnant.

At least it got me out of the house.

The morning she’d called, Mom hugged me four times, Billy five, all before I’d pulled on my socks and poured milk over my cereal. They hurled “I love yous” against my back as I fast-walked out the front door. Some days, I wanted to turn around and hug them back. On others, I wanted to punch them straight in the face, run away to Thailand, Hawaii, Myrtle Beach, somewhere with sun and ocean.

I thank god that Darryl’s boyfriend fucked a Walgreens checkout girl.

If Darryl’s boyfriend had been kind, loyal, kept his dick in his pants, I wouldn’t have answered the phone that day. Darryl could make small talk with a tree, had a laugh that made shoulders relax—he manned the counter and answered the phones, I just waited for addresses and drove the warm boxes to their homes.

But Darryl’s boyfriend was having a quarter-life crisis. Ketchup no longer tasted right, law school was starting to give him headaches, at night he lay awake next to the man he loved and counted sheep, 202, 203, 204, tried not to ask the question that had ruined his favorite condiment, spoiled his dreams, replaced sleep with sheep—is this it? One day, he walked into a Walgreens to buy a pack of gum and was greeted by a smile and a pair of D cups. The next day, Darryl spent most of his shift curbside, yelling into his phone. The front door was wide open, and I tried not to listen, but failed.

“On our first date you told me that even the word ‘pussy’ made you feel like you needed a shower.”

It was the slowest part of the day. A quarter past three. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner, pizza was heavy for a mid-afternoon snack. The place was empty except for me and the three cooks. They waved hello and goodbye and not much else. I couldn’t tell if they didn’t speak English or if they just didn’t want to speak to me.

“You know you’ve ruined Walgreens for me, right? I’m going to have to drive ten extra minutes now and go to the CVS to get my Twizzlers. God damn it, you know that I can’t get through a day without my fucking Twizzlers.”

I was sitting on an empty table, turning paper napkins into birds and stars and listening to my iPod at a volume that allowed me to think, but not too deeply. I couldn’t remember the name of the boy I used to share Cheetos with in first grade. I wondered if I had ever used every drop of a pen’s ink. All shades of blue made my chest warm. Our boss, Peter, napped around this time. Every day, at 3:00 p.m. without fail, he’d close his office door and ask us to please, please not fuck anything up. We never fucked anything up. We also didn’t get much done. I stared at a large puddle of orange soda on the floor and made a paper-napkin man to sit among the birds and the stars. “Oh God, tell me you wore a condom.”

The phone rang then. I was about to call for Darryl. He started shouting about abortion.

I’d be lying if I said I don’t look back on this moment and feel its weight. I could’ve just let it ring—no one would’ve known. I didn’t. I hopped off the table, walked to the counter, picked up the phone, and heard her voice for the first time.

“So—have you ever had the kind of week where every afternoon seems to last for hours?” Her voice was heavy, quivering, the sound of genuine desperation. Before I could reply, the woman kept talking. “Like, you’ll water your plants, fold your laundry, make your kid a snack, vacuum the rug, read a couple articles, watch some TV, call your mom, wash your face, maybe do some ab exercises to get the blood pumping, and then you’ll check the clock and thirteen minutes have passed. You know?”

I opened my mouth, but she kept on going.

“And it’s only Wednesday! I’m insane, I know. I’m insane.

But do you know what I mean?”

I waited a few beats to make sure she was done. Her breathing was loud and labored.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

“Yes! So—you’ll help me?”

I frowned, started ripping up an old receipt. “I think you may have the wrong number.”

“Is this Eddie’s?”

“Oh, yeah. It is.”

“Then this is exactly the right number. You’re the only person who can help me.”

I remember shivering, wanting to wrap this woman in a blanket and make her a hot chocolate, fuck up anyone that even looked at her funny. “Okay, what can I do?”

“I need a large pepperoni-and-pickles pizza or my son will not eat.”

“I can put in an order for a large pepperoni pizza. We don’t have pickles as a topping, though.”

“I know you don’t. Nowhere out here does,” she said. “You’re the sixth place I’ve called.”

“So what are you asking?” I rubbed my lower back. It had been aching inexplicably the past couple of weeks. I figured it was the baby’s fault.

“We just moved here a month ago from North Dakota. My husband got an amazing job offer and we love it here, all the palm trees, but our son, Adam, hates Los Angeles. He misses home, his friends, he doesn’t get along with his new baseball coach.” She sighed.

She continued: “He’s on a hunger strike. A couple days ago he came up to me and said, ‘Mommy, I’m not eating a damn thing until we go back to Bismarck.’ Can you believe that? Who has ever said that? Who likes Bismarck? And that potty mouth! Seven years old and already talking like a fucking sailor. How does that happen?”

I wasn’t even sure if she was talking to me anymore. I looked at the clock and saw that I’d been on the phone for over five minutes. It was the longest conversation I’d had with someone other than Mom or Billy in weeks. Darryl too, I guess, but that felt like it didn’t count.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I just still don’t understand how I can help with this.”

“There was this pizza place back home that used to make the best pepperoni-and-pickles pizza. I swear, I’ve tried doing it myself, just ordering a regular old pepperoni pizza and putting the pickles on after. He said it wasn’t right, and when I asked him what wasn’t right about it, he just kept saying, ‘It’s not right,’ over and over, louder and louder, and wouldn’t stop until I yelled over him, ‘Okay, you’re right! It’s not right!’ ” She paused. “I just thought maybe if I could get him that pizza, something that reminded him of home, this silly hunger strike could end and he could start to love Los Angeles.”

There was a long pause. I would’ve thought she’d hung up if not for that loud, labored breathing.

When she spoke again, her voice was softer. I thought of birds with broken wings, glass vases so beautiful and fragile I was afraid to look at them for too long. “It just feels like I’ve been failing a lot lately,” she said. “I can’t even get dinner right.”

I thought of a night two years ago. Dad was still alive and living with us. The Bears game had just started. He wasn’t drunk yet, but by halftime he’d have finished at least a six-pack. Some nights, I was the best thing that ever happened to him, his pride, his joy; he talked often of buying us plane tickets to New York City and taking me to the top of the Empire State Building. On other nights, I was a dumb bitch, a waste of space; sometimes he’d throw his empties at me. I didn’t want to find out what type of night it was. My window opened out onto the roof. I climbed out of it to sit and smoke, try to find stars in the sky. I was about to light up when I looked down and saw Mom’s car pull into the driveway.

I watched as she took the key from the ignition, killed the lights. I waited for her to come inside. She didn’t. She sat in the driver’s seat, just sat. Five minutes went by and she was still sitting, staring out the windshield. I wondered what she was staring at, if she actually was staring at anything, or if she was just thinking, or maybe trying not to think, just having a moment when nothing moved or mattered—I wished that she was at least listening to music. She sat and stared another ten minutes before going inside.

There was a supermarket not far from Eddie’s. Pickles were cheap. “What’s your address?” I asked.

The cooks eyed me funny when I came into the kitchen with a brown paper bag. They looked only slightly less nervous when I pulled a pickle jar out of it.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m just helping this lady out.” They stared blankly at me.

“Her kid isn’t eating.” Silence.

“Can you guys get me a large pepperoni?”

They looked at each other, shrugged, and started pulling the dough. I chopped a couple pickles into uneven slices and wedged myself between the cooks, sprinkled the pickles over the sauce, cheese, and meat. I told myself that it only looked off because it was raw, but the cooks didn’t seem to know what to make of it either. One sniffed it, another laughed, the third just stared and scratched his head. They eventually shrugged again and put the pizza in the oven.

While I waited, I walked out of the kitchen and to the front of the shop. Darryl was off the phone and back inside, pouring rum into a soda cup. We stared at each other for a moment. His eyes were red and puffy; his face looked strange without a smile.

I coughed, just for something to do. “Any calls?”

“Just one,” he said. “Midway through, the guy decided he wanted Chinese and hung up.”

“Cool. I picked up one while you were—when you—” I coughed again. “Cool.”

I thought about asking him if he was okay, decided to mop the floor instead. Peter would be waking up soon and didn’t need much to start yelling at us. Darryl sipped his drink and wiped down the counter.

I mopped half the shop before my mind began to wander. There was a slip of paper in the back left pocket of my jeans with an address and the name Jenny Hauser scribbled above it.

“I’m Jenny, by the way. Jenny Hauser,” she’d said after she thanked me for the third time. “My grandma also had the same name. I don’t remember much about her except that she made real good rhubarb pie and hated black people.”

I’d thought she sounded too old to be a Jenny. She should be a Jen or a firm Jennifer—Jenny had a ponytail and scrapes on her knees, liked the crusts cut off of her PB and J’s, fought with her mom but always apologized, had never really been in love but had plenty of crushes on boys in her class, teachers who showed her kindness, Jenny believed in God and Kenny Chesney—I couldn’t stop imagining what she looked like.

“Yo,” Darryl hollered. “Order up.”

My dad didn’t have any money to leave us. He did have a ’99 Ford Festiva.

The paint job was faded, the driver’s door dented; there was a questionable yellow stain on the back seat; the A/C was broken, stuck on high, freezing air pumped through the car, even in the winter. Simply put, the car was a piece of shit.

I’d told Mom we should sell it for parts, take whatever we could get. She shook her head and said she couldn’t, she remembered him bringing it home for the first time. “He looked so handsome stepping out of it. He bought me flowers too,” she said. “Sunflowers.” I didn’t remember that. I did remember him teaching me to drive in it. He’d smoke and sip from his red thermos, flick ashes on me whenever I drove too slow or forgot to signal. Once, I sideswiped a car in a Popeyes parking lot and he made me iron his shirts and shine his shoes every Sunday night for a month.

When Mom got a new car last year—a used ’07 Toyota Camry that didn’t have dents or stains or broken radios, was a sleek shiny silver—she dropped the keys to the Festiva on my bedside table. I let the car sit in front of the house a week before I lost all willpower.

I spent that whole day driving, every song sounded good on full blast. It was a Los Angeles winter day, seventy and cloudless. Everything looked crisp and clean through the windshield. The full gas tank and the open road made my fingers and toes tingle. A man was selling oranges on the shoulder of a highway. I bought four bags and shouted along with a song that was about a girl and a goat and Missoula, Montana.

The radio was off when I was driving to Jenny’s house for the first time. My palms were sweaty against the steering wheel and I had that tight-chest feeling I sometimes got when I drank too much coffee. I hadn’t had any coffee for over a week. Billy said it was bad for the baby, he didn’t want to have a little girl or boy with twelve toes and poor reading skills.

The address took me to a nice part of town where all the homes were big and uniform with perfectly mowed front lawns. I saw three different golden retrievers being walked by three different women in tracksuits before I pulled up to her home. I was relieved to see that, though her home was big, it didn’t annoy me. It was one of the smaller ones on the block, and her lawn was slightly overgrown and yellowing in some places.

The coffee chest–feeling increased as I stepped out of my car and started walking to the front door. I appreciated then how good I felt on a daily basis, calm and centered, how little fazed me, my ability to walk tall and look straight ahead. Three weeks ago I peed on a stick, and when the little pink plus winked up at me, I walked downstairs, opened the freezer, and ate a Popsicle, thought about what I wanted to watch that night, a rom-com or an action movie—both would have broad-chested dudes, did I want to cry or see shit get blown up?

There was sweat in places I didn’t know I could sweat. I was confused why this instance of all instances was making me damp behind the knees, between my toes. As I knocked on Jenny’s door, three times hard, I reminded myself that she was just some lady with some kid. Then she opened the door and I wanted to take her hand and invite her to come with me whenever I ran away to Myrtle Beach.

From Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier. Copyright © 2020 by Jean Kyoung Frazier. All rights reserved. 

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We Had No Rules
Corinne Manning

My family had no rules. At least it felt that way for a time, because most of the rules were vague and unspoken: don’t lie, or steal, or hurt. If I was mean to my sister, or my sister to me, we would apologize. We did the dishes together every night. We shared toys. When she read to me, I would thank her, and if I wanted her to read to me, she would, unless she had too much homework. Our parents’ rules had to be enforced only after we broke them—after my sister broke them. By the time I was old enough to encounter the same dilemma, I already knew the edict, and through watching her, I knew what rules to follow. Which was why, at sixteen, I left home, just as my sister had, only I ran away because there was one rule I couldn’t keep from breaking. If I knew anything about my parents it was where they stood, so why expect different results?

I was lucky, because when it was my turn, Stacy was twenty-four, set up in a rent-controlled apartment in Chelsea with only two roommates. She worked as a paralegal and attended classes at Hunter most nights. It was 1992, and I had a place to go.

Stacy was mad at first. She held my hand as we walked from the subway to her apartment, and I felt so much better now that my hand had a place to be. My hands get icy when I’m nervous. When I was little, Stacy used to rub them until they were warm again, and I wondered if she remembered this. I felt small and untethered as we walked down those streets, because I smelled perfume and trash and urine, saw posters of men kissing and women kissing, and because over the din of cars and voices I heard the roaring immensity of what I’d done.

“You gave them what they wanted,” she said. She jerked my hand as we turned a corner.

I hadn’t seen Stacy since she left, and she’d gone through a complete transformation. She traded running shoes for leather boots that went up to just over her knees and had huge heels. She towered over me by almost a foot. The bangles on her wrists clanked together, and her hair—which was shaved when I last saw her, a rule broken—was a gorgeous orange mess.

She had a unique kind of insight into what I was going through. “You made it easy for them. They want you to feel so ashamed that you leave. There’s this way they pretend there’re no rules, and they subtly suffocate you. That’s what they did to me, only they posed it as a choice. If you wanted to do it differently, you would have given them the ultimatum, like: ‘Either you accept me and we talk about this, or I’m getting the fuck out of here.’”

I pulled my hand out of her grip to adjust my shoulder bag, but I regretted it because afterwards her hand wasn’t available anymore. She shoved it into the pocket of her neon-yellow hunting vest. I stayed close to her, taking as much comfort as I could from the rub of her arm against mine.

We paused at a traffic light and I could tell she wanted to bolt across, but she was trying to set a good example of how to cross the street. I leaned into her a little more.

“I’d rather be with you, though,” I said. “I wanted to be with you.”

It had been a long time since I’d seen her cry, and there was this way that tears just suddenly flooded around her lids—you wouldn’t have known she was upset until this happened—like a mysterious dam had been opened. She grabbed my hand and rubbed her thumb briskly over my skin, then we ran together across the street.

When I arrived at the apartment, there was a closet made up like a room for me and her things were in bins just outside it. I didn’t complain about having no window because she did some sweet things to the closet to make it feel like a room. She suspended a kind of mobile that her roommate Jill made out of spoon and fork handles. Her other roommate, who turned out to always be touring with some band, built a few shelves at the end of the closet so I could put my things up there. My main light was a paper lantern, and sometimes I felt like a caterpillar in a whimsical cocoon.

That first morning she took me to her favourite bakery and watched me eat two chocolate chip banana muffins, mine and hers.

“Look, I’m not going to totally police you, but you can’t just bring home any girl, because you have to remember that this is also home to all of us, and if you and some girl decide to fuck—”

“Stacy!” I looked around to see if anyone had heard, but no one seemed bothered.

“If you decide to fuck, you have to be respectful. No shouting. I don’t want to hear ’cause you’re my baby sister, and Jill’s room is right against that closet and you don’t want to do that to her either. I’ve already told Jill and Toby this, but I’m going to say it to you, too—don’t fuck my roommates. You can have sex with anyone as long as they aren’t living with us at the time. You need to realize this—”

She leaned forward real close and I stopped chewing.

“You and I are partners now, and I worked hard to get this clean, safe apartment with these not-so-clean, stable people, and if you fuck it up, we are both out, and I know you don’t know this yet, but sex is really fucking messy and what you get into will affect me too.”

“I know about sex,” I said.

Stacy smiled, then tried to hide it. “I’m pretty sure all you’ve done is hold hands under the covers at a sleepover and she let you kiss her neck while she pretended to be asleep.”

I looked down and picked up some crumbs from the wax paper with my pointer and put them in my mouth.

“She was definitely awake,” I said.

“I’m gonna take care of you,” she said. “We’re gonna figure out school, and I’ll help you find a job. You won’t go through what I went through. Okay?” She looked at me so seriously.

I nodded. I know that wasn’t enough of an acknowledgment, but the fact that I even nodded is commendable, I think, at sixteen.

I didn’t know, at this point, what she went through. I knew it was terrible, because early on she called my parents and left this message on the answering machine that made me tremble and cry because she was sobbing and saying she wanted to come home. She left a number for a pay phone, and when she answered, her voice sounded like mine, like a child’s, and I begged my mom to get on the phone and listen. And my mom just kept saying, Youmadeyourchoice, youmadeyourchoice, and I heard my sister on the other end screaming, Please, please, the word scraping away, digging for anything decent but striking rock after rock. I hid in the other room until, finally, one of them hung up.

After breakfast, I sat on the toilet lid and watched her get ready for work, just like I used to watch her get ready for school before she left home. She straightened her hair and brushed it out so that it lay smooth and thick around her shoulders. Her lipstick was modestly pink. I didn’t breathe while she applied liquid eyeliner, for fear I’d somehow make her smudge it.

“I’ll be home at two and I don’t have to be in class until seven, so we can do whatever in between.” She smiled at me in the mirror. I was wearing an outfit Mom had picked out for me—red cords and a pink turtleneck.

“Maybe we’ll dress you in some different clothes. I’ll call in some favours.” She closed her eyeliner and dropped it into her purse. She pressed her cheek against mine in lieu of a kiss.

I was entranced: here I was, smelling her makeup again. When she closed the door, I felt a lonely kind of despair.

Excerpted from We Had No Rules by Corinne Manning. Published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Copyright © 2020 by Corinne Manning. 

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A Burning
Megha Majumdar

JIVAN

“You smell like smoke,” my mother said to me.

So I rubbed an oval of soap in my hair and poured a whole bucket of water on myself before a neighbor complained that I was wasting the morning supply.

There was a curfew that day. On the main street, a police jeep would creep by every half hour. Daily-wage laborers, compelled to work, would come home with arms raised to show they had no weapons.

In bed, my wet hair spread on the pillow, I picked up my new phone—purchased with my own salary, screen guard still attached.

On Facebook, there was only one conversation.

These terrorists attacked the wrong neighborhood #KolabaganTrainAttack #Undefeated

Friends, if you have fifty rupees, skip your samosas today and donate to—

The more I scrolled, the more Facebook unrolled.

This news clip exclusively from 24 Hours shows how—

Candlelight vigil at—

The night before, I had been at the railway station, no more than a fifteen-minute walk from my house. I ought to have seen the men who stole up to the open windows and threw flaming torches into the halted train. But all I saw were carriages, burning, their doors locked from the outside and dangerously hot. The fire spread to huts bordering the station, smoke filling the chests of those who lived there. More than a hundred people died. The government promised compensation to the families of the dead—eighty thousand rupees!—which, well, the government promises many things.

In a video, to the dozen microphones thrust at his chin, the chief minister was saying, “Let the authorities investigate.” Somebody had spliced this comment with a video of policemen scratching their heads. It made me laugh.

I admired these strangers on Facebook who said anything they wanted to. They were not afraid of making jokes. Whether it was about the police or the ministers, they had their fun, and wasn’t that freedom? I hoped that after a few more salary slips, after I rose to be a senior sales clerk of Pantaloons, I would be free in that way too.

Then, in a video clip further down the page, a woman came forward, her hair flying, her nose running a wet trail down to her lips, her eyes red. She was standing on the sloping platform of our small railway station. Into the microphone she screamed: “There was a jeep full of policemen right there. Ask them why they stood around and watched while my husband burned. He tried to open the door and save my daughter. He tried and tried.”

I shared that video. I added a caption.

Policemen paid by the government watched and did nothing while this innocent woman lost everything, I wrote.

I laid the phone next to my head, and dozed. The heat brought sleep to my eyes. When I checked my phone next, there were only two likes. A half hour later, still two likes.

Then a woman, I don’t know who, commented on my post. How do you know this person is not faking it? Maybe she wants attention!

I sat up. Was I friends with this person? In her profile picture she was posing in a bathroom.

Did you even watch the video? I replied.

The words of the heartless woman drifted in my mind. I was irritated by her, but there was excitement too. This was not the frustration of no water in the municipal pump or power cut on the hottest night. Wasn’t this a kind of leisure dressed up as agitation?

For me, the day was a holiday, after all. My mother was cooking fish so small we would eat them bones and tail. My father was taking in the sun, his back pain eased.

Under my thumb, I watched post after post about the train attack earn fifty likes, a hundred likes, three hundred likes. Nobody liked my reply.

And then, in the small, glowing screen, I wrote a foolish thing. I wrote a dangerous thing, a thing nobody like me should ever think, let alone write.

Forgive me, Ma.

If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean, I wrote on Facebook, that the government is also a terrorist?

Outside the door, a man slowly pedaled his rickshaw, the only passenger his child, the horn going paw paw for her glee.

Excerpted from A Burning by Megha Majumdar. Copyright © 2020 by Megha Majumdar. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 

Audio excerpted courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio from A Burning by Megha Majumdar, narrated by Vikas Adam, Priya Ayyar, Deepti Gupta, Ulka Mohanty, Soneela Nankani, and Neil Shah.