Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories.
A Premonition: Recollected
MANY years later, Mor will think back to her vision of two gunmen, whom she will not remember murdered her brothers, and she will see the gunmen in the night, in the snow, huddled at the base of a mulberry tree, at the end of a pathway, waiting for two orbs of light, orbs like spirits, like twin souls, floating through dark and snow, falling snow, and she will see the cold mist of their breaths, the frost collecting at the tips of the strands of their black beards, and she will see their chapped lips, their gentle eyes watering, and for a moment or two she will wonder why the gunmen in her vision won’t go home and huddle in the warmth of an old blanket sewn, perhaps, by a long-forgotten mother, just a girl when she married, a child, kidnapped and beaten and forced into the bedroom of her husband, made to conceive two sons she could never wholly love, before dying in the thousandth bombing of a benevolent American invasion, her boys left behind to be raised by a war that will inevitably lead them to the mouth of an alley in the heart of Logar, and Mor will see their eyes seeing the headlights of her brothers’ Corolla tumbling down upon clay and ice and shadow, and she will see the gunmen step out from under the cover of ancient branches into snowfall, into halos of light obscuring the faces of innocent men destined to be martyred for crimes they could never imagine, and she will see the tips of their fingers, already bitten by frost, inch toward the warmth of the trigger.
They must have been so cold, she will think to herself, having forgotten all else.
From https://www.saaganthology.com/article/a-premonition%3B-recollected
Torsa Ghosal is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her short fiction has won prizes from Berkeley Fiction Review, The Brooklyn Review, and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. Her essays and translation have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Bustle, and she was named runner up for the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize. She is an associate professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.
Excerpt from "Camp City"
"Your friend shows you photos of trees cloaked in spiderwebs when you go on a smoking break. You are among the lucky men who have landed jobs this summer, repairing the boundary fence that separates Camp City from the rest of Nadia district.
Between taking drags on your beedi, you pinch the screen of your friend’s phone to enlarge the photo. The spiderwebs are unbroken, enormous, like the nets your neighbors cast in the Churni river to catch fish. Only here, the nets have caught trees. Dense crowns smothered in thick mesh bring back the stifling nights of childhood, when three generations of your family lay on the dirt floor under one mosquito net. Your grandmother used to snore beside you. The pungent odor of mustard oil coming from her hair remains stuck in your nose, though she is long gone."