Per Contra An International Journal of the Arts, Literature, and Ideas

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issue 27 > fiction

  • Master

    by Rumjhum Biswas
    Kalipada sitting on his haunches, an idle bidi in dirty-greasy fingers watched the trains passing by Haur station. The whole country was ablaze with golden emotions, none of which touched Kalipada.

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  • Doubting Thomas

    by Matthew Clark Davison
    This morning's headline was a single word hanging over a picture of Thomas and last year's forth grade class. Not the official school photo, but a candid shot under the oaks on the school's grounds just as spring in Portland started to give way to summer and the geraniums began to dot the wooded floor. "Pedophile?" it asked in Times New Roman. Bold.

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  • Central Hotel

    by Victor Ehikhamenor
    I threw my biro high into the air and watched it drift off to the bush behind our exam hall. Pako kissed his biro, flipped it twice between his fingers and dropped it inside his pocket like John Wayne with his pistols. We'd just finished our last West Africa Examination Council paper and we were so excited that there would be no more secondary school for us. We had thought of doing so many things on our last day of school, including deflating the tires of our math teacher's Peugeot 404. That idea was Pako's, my friend who got more punishment than anyone else from this teacher during the five years in school.

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  • Skylark Girl

    by Aruni Kashyap
    Three weeks before Tejimola was born, her mother Numoli had eaten so many orange coloured ripe peaches, and swallowed so many slippery seeds that she was reminded of her childhood fear of turning into a tree overnight if you swallowed seeds by mistake. Petrified, she couldn't sleep all night. She had strange dreams of turning into different kinds of trees: a large-trunked tamarind tree, slim, lanky and weak papaya tree, or a mango tree where ghosts chose to reside.

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  • Failing the Trapeze

    by Susan V. Meyers
    Late in the summer of the year I turned eight, my mother decided that we should all learn trapeze. I don't know where she found it, but one day she came home with a bar and cabling, and ordered two of my brothers to string it up in our back yard.

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  • Some Call It Sadness

    by Nicole Rivas
    The television in Lorenzo's Market is showing a novella and there are flies buzzing everywhere. They’re going crazy it's so hot, zipping head on into display cases and wrestling each other against sticky paper traps.

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  • Where She Went

    by Wendy Wimmer
    Before that unnamed baby started showing up each night, she had been a happy woman. Or at least she thought so. Happy and lucky, in fact. Sometimes she'd drive up their street in their desired bedroom community and look at their own little bungalow squatting in its wide corner lot and it would frighten her, how perfect and happy her life was. The windows with awnings were two sleepy-hooded eyes. Although she would never admit it to anyone, some nights she would pause for a moment in the driveway, afraid to cross the walk and step into its yawning open jaws.

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