Books of humorous essays can be hit or miss. Too often, the collection lacks cohesion or the humor can feel cloying. Scaachi Koul’s debut, One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, is the rare collection in which none of the essays feel expendable. Rather, each one is well-crafted and thoroughly entertaining, balancing keen insight with effortless, acerbic wit.
Koul’s essays largely center around her identity and how it was shaped by her upbringing in Calgary as a child of Indian immigrants, the racism (both subtle and overt) she’s experienced growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood, and the sexism embedded in both Western and Indian cultures. Her experiences feeling like an outsider undoubtedly helped influence her perspective, which is uniquely her own.…
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Her particular kind of witchcraft only worked when she lived on the run. It was a hiding magic. She pulled veils over the house and rooms she entered, leaving Uber drivers and pizza delivery boys stranded on the street.
“Oh sorry, I think I missed your house,” friends would say, pulling up to her front door.
She charmed the mail slot to delete her letters. A spell twisted the creaks in the stairs into traps. She sat under a large, one-way window, watching the dogs outside. She drank warm tea and broth and swept soft snow off the steps, sprinkling it with salt. At night, familiars traced the yard.…
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Three out of nine days, writing for William Talbot was a joy. The other six days his time would be better-spent fishing. This typically gorgeous morning in the colonial city of San Miguel de Allende, Central Mexico, where the air strokes the skin like a lover, started out one of the joy days. But then the telephone rang. A low down bedroom whisper asked for him by name. He thought she might be one of his students. “We need to meet right away. You have information I’ve got to have.”
Couldn’t be about her grade. After the university back home refused to give him tenure he quit and came down here to teach tourists, hoping to connect for romance. He did not give grades. “What information?”…
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Mary Burk didn’t have much on top so she had to work her booty. Fourteen years old and still no period. Her mom told her breasts wouldn’t really develop until that happened and in the meantime, she should make do with what she had.
“When Aunt Flow is late,” her mother told her, “It means you’ll be taller, and thinner than your classmates, and then those boobs will come on like gangbusters and if they don’t there’s always plastic surgery.”
Mary wondered if any of her friends had mother-daughter talks like the ones she had with Ellen. That’s what Mom wanted Mary to call her now.
“So we can be girlfriends, right?” Ellen said. “Now let me show you how to move that ass.”…
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He reached down and picked up the locket. It had been smashed into the mud by a passerby. There was no chain. The eyelet at the top of the locket was bent open, but the locket was still clasped shut. The day was warm and bright around him, the street bustling with movement and sound. On a telephone line above, a collied blackbird told the story, and no one listened, not even the man holding the locket. His heart felt lighter than it had a moment before.
He said of her, “She is smart—really smart.” His closest friend, a woman with short-cropped curly brown hair and tight lines radiating from the corners of her mouth, thought that he meant She is not beautiful. He meant that her nightstand overflowed with books, that she would rise suddenly in the small hours of the night and trace her fingertips along the spines lining her bookshelf to retrieve an exact quotation, that her intelligence rattled in him an ego he hadn’t realized was there.…
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Sarah-Jean Krahn is the Managing Editor of feminist writing journal S/tick and holds an MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory from McMaster University. Her writing appears in various anthologies and journals, including Berkeley Poetry Review and Feminist Studies, and she was recently nominated for a Pushcart.
Please describe your website and your duties as editor/writer.
I like to think of S/tick as an ever-growing creative collaborative community of feminist writers and artists. In keeping with our mission to publish things that are difficult to say or hard to find a home for, we strive to share as many feminist voices as possible by currently publishing 50%+ of the submissions we receive. To some degree, S/tick snags the poems and stories that have been relegated to an eternal time-out, castigated as too complain-y, too feminist, too real.…
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Emptiness eats at the heart, more surely than time itself,
yet some days we are blessed with company
enabling us to see just beyond the emaciated self.
Though the day ahead seems barren, a friend
will sometimes bring along all the light you lack to coast
above the dour grey slates and chimney pots.
So we make our soup of fresh tomatoes and basil
in the garret kitchen, and the knots in the stomach
loosen their grip as we make ready to eat and talk.
No time now for last year’s man, or any lost inventory
of sights not seen, things not done, time wasted
in procrastination, or dreams hardly begun.
And though we are still both dreamers of sorts,
we stand beside immense facades, telling the other
there is no need for touch, or sex, or love.…
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