Walang Hiya, Brother by Melissa R. Sipin

Walang Hiya, Brother by Melissa R. Sipin

Outside on the porch’s front steps, I can hear my niece Andrea cry and cry and my father yelling at the T.V. that’s playing his favorite game show Wowowee—you know the one, where scantily clad, fair-skinned girls dance to American pop music as an older pinay from the barrios steps into a tank with floating money, catches as much as she can with a broomstick, and everybody laughs. I can hear my sister on the phone as my aunts surround her, harping, barking orders in Tagalog. The wedding is in three days.

A Matter of a Few Hours by Ramola D

A Matter of a Few Hours by Ramola D

Cameras. Lights. His face on television, pinched, distraught, out of control as he wept. He had never intended to break down in front of all these people, but the horrible loss of his one-year-old son, an infinitely vulnerable baby, pushed him to it. He had shaken her on camera. Taken her by the shoulders, shouted. Her face blank when they played it back, white in the glare of the lights,

The Boy Who Climbed His Mother Into Heaven by Andy Johnson

The Boy Who Climbed His Mother Into Heaven by Andy Johnson

I will climb my mother to Heaven, he said to himself, tittering, mumbling, unafraid to walk the dusty streets of Gbarnga day or night even during the riots because his mother, the woman who loved him, the woman he found years ago after coming home from the market with no chicken but the head of a cassava fish a merchant had thrown to the dogs and found boys no older than himself, six or seven, Charles Taylor’s boys singing, dirty, ransacking their house for food and clothing, chanting He Kill My Ma, He Kill My Pa, I Vote For Him.

Mother of Sorrows by Aaron Michael Morales

Mother of Sorrows by Aaron Michael Morales

The kisses have become the extent of Marcela and Arturo’s intimacy, and her signal to begin her daily routine. She lets out the breath she has been holding in, the remnants of Arturo’s morning scent, and walks down the hall to the girls’ room where her five daughters toss and turn and slobber and smack their lips to their dreams about boys and flowers and dances. She flicks the light switch and clears her throat. It is all she needs to do to wake the oldest two girls, who will then wake the remaining girls with their fighting over the bathroom and the brush and the costume jewelry that they sneak to school in their book bags and put on while riding the bus to the Santa Rita school compound which houses grades K through 12.  

The Fight of the Century by Marko Fong

The Fight of the Century by Marko Fong

When Henry Hemmings needed a transistor radio in March 1971, I insisted that he take mine. We were at the long sink in the bathroom during the break between evening study halls.  Henry was trimming his goatee with a safety razor and I was applying a marginally effective acne medication to the left side of my face. Henry was sixteen and I was fourteen.  We were both in fourth form at the Nathan School, but Henry was already a starter on the football and basketball teams, which made him the coolest guy in our class. I was the only Asian student in the school, which made me more of an oddity than any kind of cool.