It’s 11:30 P.M. on Friday, July 2, 2021, and 69-year-old Matt Floyd lies alone in an empty field changing the tires on his race-car as a deer looks on from a field in darkness about a hundred yards away. The sole light will turn off, and the deer will take…

I wrote this short story in the early spring of 2020 when the incoming pandemic filled our communities with fear. It is a piece of fiction based on real events. …

I wrote this essay shortly after returning home to Mississippi from Yale in March of 2020 due to the coronavirus’s impending entry into our American way of life. It is a piece of fiction based off real events — a portrait of landscape that might never change even if it…

Double Fault. Advantage Team Russia. Double Fault. Set Team Russia. Third set. Jan-Lennard Struff looks lost. I tuned in late, spending the evening finishing my assignments and absolutely destroying a heated-up cinnamon blondie, but I came just in time to see the camera pan to Struff’s gaze during the rain…

Jackson, Mississippi — January 17, 2021. There are tanks in Ohio, lined by the dozens outside of the Capitol. In D.C., there are 20,000 troops in an area only a couple times larger than my college campus. In Michigan, there are SWAT trucks, aided and abetted by police officers, black…

There was something about the lights. Years later, I learned that I had a bad stigmatism, and that is why the big, booming lights over the tennis courts looked like huge star-flares ready to transport me to another galaxy. It was probably a mixture of that and dehydration — I…

“It’s coming through a hole in the air From those nights in Tiananmen Square It’s coming from the feel That this ain’t exactly real Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there From the wars against disorder From the sirens night and day From the fires of the homeless From the ashes of the gay Democracy is coming to…

We looked at each other from a distance, silence filling the great divide between us. I looked up towards the intercom speaker, halfway expecting the callous intercom voice above to countdown. ”3…2…1,” and we would both whip out our guns for a duel. But, alas, we were not on the…