Thank You for Your Service
Thank you for your service.The woman spoke the words with a smile, like a catechism, eyes flicking from the long line of soldiers to her children, watching to make sure they saw the rite performed. Her...
View ArticleChosen
AfterMy friend Andy’s perched on the back of his friend Gabe’s couch, and I can tell from the way he’s pulling on his ear that he’s formulating a speech. The others don’t notice because they’re...
View ArticleRegarding our audio recordings
Earlier today we published an essay about OutKast by Dr. Regina Bradley. This is an essay written by a Black woman, about Black musicians, and edited by a Black man. I hired a white man to narrate the...
View ArticleDa Art of Speculatin’
I’m a southern Black woman who stands in the long shadow of the Civil Rights Movement. Southern hip hop helped me navigate the contemporary Black South. When I gathered with friends, southern hip hop...
View ArticleInterim Editorial Director
Hi, this is Brian J. White, the founder of Fireside Magazine and its former editor-in-chief and publisher.Effective immediately, Pablo Defendini is resigning from all editorial functions at Fireside...
View ArticleAbout our Print Edition
Since I took over as interim editorial director last week, I’ve been working hard to get up to speed on the various changes Fireside has undergone since my tenure ended in 2017, and to examine what...
View ArticleIn the Glass Hall of Supreme Women
The moment she stepped into the Glass Hall, she felt a brief shudder, but she chided herself and was still. She was here for her husband. He had married her with pride, and she would do her utmost to...
View ArticleRealism
Ashi doesn’t know where the bodies go when he finishes, and he doesn’t care.When he finally lets his hand fall, slender fingers and silver brush dripping with black ink that vanishes before reaching...
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Object Permanence
Zain started tweeting as the lighthouse on a lark. The federal board certainly didn’t order him. Even the coast guard had stopped maintaining Oren Lighthouse: it never made the Massachusetts tourist...
View ArticleThe Boy with the Golden Arm
Behind the Coliseum, a crowd gathered around a food truck and a booth that sold vintage audio gear. A line of hapless emcees stretched around thirty-five or forty bodies from Michael to a vault-like...
View ArticleLetters from Yours
Papa,Now that I have been a fortnight in their alabaster city, I think that I might try to write about them. When I first arrived with a dozen others, it was all I could do not to trip over my own...
View ArticleMouth & Marsh, Silver & Song
I was born to the marsh with a memory of silver, acute as fear and soft as peat on my tongue.When my eyes opened, they fell upon the most beautiful woman I had ever seen: the leeches, pale white, had...
View ArticleThat Time I Found a Phone Booth Where I Can Talk to My (Dead) Dad
I used to take walks along a patch of scruffy waste ground a couple of blocks from my house in Indiana. It’s where the old RCA factory stood before the city tore it down. Back when I had a dog, I...
View ArticleAt the Intersection of Light and Sound
I knew from the outset of this mission that there would be no return trip for me. But I am renewed in my realization that I have come back to the start. That I will be reunited with everything and...
View ArticleNavigational Error
The door to your sleeping compartment whooshes open, so I swivel in the pilot’s chair to greet you. But my “Morning, gorgeous!” dies halfway up my throat when I see your face. Your eyes are bloodshot,...
View ArticleWhistle Posts of Forgotten Railroads
The train tracks run not by my house but near, along a railroad viaduct slicing our city into a here and a there, into this neighborhood and that. A raised battlement of weeds and trees topping...
View ArticleDiamonds and Pearls
Diamonds are two a penny, but everybody wants them anyway.At first, Osian thinks it’s because they hurt. Every time he speaks a new word in the common tongue and a diamond comes up, it feels like...
View ArticleSugar
You have been chosen from all of the unmarried girls in your village. It is a great honour. People you have known your whole life gather outside of your grandmother’s house. They bring gifts of...
View ArticleWe Are Not Phoenixes
Remember that they are people. Most of them will be just as awed by what you can do as all your other audiences. If they’ve invited you, then they want you here. Don’t treat them differently. The...
View ArticleThose We See at the Twilight Bridge
The old man wheezes. Amid the beeping of machinery, I stand over his hospital bed, waiting for him to open his eyes.“Helen?” he mutters, perplexed, when he sees me.I am not Helen, but I smile and take...
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