Illustration by Sam Island
By Omar El Akkad
“I met him once. This was a couple years ago, long after all that mess with the tape, long after he’d quit. My ex and I were driving from Vicksburg to visit her parents in Vegas, taking the back roads, making a little vacation of it. We stopped for lunch at this diner in Pie Town, New Mexico, a real nowhere place. And there he is.”
By William Deverell
“I can’t imagine why he chose me, but here I am, in his opulent tropical oceanfront suite, asking myself: do I sell my soul or retreat with honour?”
By Kathryn Walsh Kuitenbrouwer
“That spring, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers drove right in and staked a claim and got to work cutting brush. Hell, there was no one to stop them, and anyway, it was just another patch of desert along the Rio Grande. It didn’t occur to them that it might be private property.”
By Terry Fallis
“It’s really not part of my job description, but no one else will do it. And there is a certain logic to it, I guess, given that I’m the one closest to him—physically, I mean. But I should earn even more danger pay than I already get for this little add-on to my duties.”
By Eliza Robertson
“On the twenty-first day of the eighth month, on the King’s golf course at Mar-a-Lago, a white dimpled sphere crosses the green, its shadow dimming each knife of grass until slotting into the hole, a corona of sun flashing from the white cup as the ball wobbles.”
This is a living project, with more stories to come.