“More and more of him was disappearing, right before my very eyes. And now, his intentions couldn’t have been made any clearer. It was no accident that he had vanished—he had wanted to leave, and the force of his desire was imbued on anything he touched. I searched myself for memory of him, I sought to recall his face. I grabbed my phone and scrolled through years of photos, trying to find one of the two of us together. My fingers trembled, fumbled uselessly. Was it possible I didn’t possess a single one?”
Ordinary Fruit
In something akin to an act of God, a young woman’s father vanishes off the face of the earth forcing her to return home to Irvine, California and reconnect with her estranged immigrant mother. In the process she begins to fictionalize her parents’ pasts in an effort to reconcile who they are now with who they were before her.
Maz is an Indonesian Vietnamese American writer and an MFA student in the fiction cohort at Cornell University. Her fiction has appeared in Aurelia Magazine, Jellyfish Review and diaCRITICS and is forthcoming in Aster(ix) magazine.