SMALL CHANGE

EXCERPT

Sometimes we rebel against the husbands. Mouna puts a little dog blood in her husband’s soup. Lucee grinds up cockroaches and puts them in her husband’s favorite dessert. Batoul soaks her husband’s prayer cap in goat pee. She washes it with the strong detergent we all use, but there is the smallest smell left that will come to him as he kneels for his prayers. We whisper these stories and laugh as we do the washing. We are still the leopard-girls that were at school just last year.

I add goat feces to the husband’s stew. He finds out. He kicks me to the ground, cracks my ribs, chokes me, and says he will pull my head off. He is an important man. He can do anything.

PRAISE  

“Small Change does what great fiction should do. Rather than strive for newness for the sake of novelty, or reinvent language to showcase the writer’s chops, it approaches language in a new way because the material—struggling for life and love in the Middle East—demands it. Fresh, invigorating, and profound, I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I did.”

– David Treuer, Judge of 2015 Fiction Chapbook Competition

AUTHOR

Sandra Hunter’s fiction has received the October 2014 Africa Book Club Award, 2014 H.E. Francis Fiction Award, 2012 Cobalt Fiction Prize, and three Pushcart Prize nominations. Her debut novel, Losing Touch, was released in July 2014 (OneWorld Publications). When she’s not working on her second novel, The Geography of Kitchen Tables, she teaches English and Creative Writing at Moorpark College and runs writing workshops in Ventura and Los Angeles.

DESIGNER

Book design by Ryan Hines.