Here you can read excerpts from my short fantasy stories available online and in various magazines.
For seventy years, a Biblical age, the shadows hungered in the village. Daylight, moonlight. Growth of weeds, and slumber of stone. The settlers smashed in the domes of the houses to keep away the living. They forgot to ward off the dead. Thirsting, the shadows raised desiccated tongues to catch the benevolence of Baal Haddad, the only god who would remember them.
Read the full text of ‘What the Ghouleh Said on Thursday of the Dead’ by Sonia Sulaiman.
I’m an archival assistant at the archives at the University of Saint Sisyphus. We catalog a lot of weird stuff, mostly– anything that doesn’t really fit in anywhere, things that have strange backstories… Most of the time it’s a pretty safe job because the artifacts are generally only supposedly cursed or haunted. Occasionally, it’s the real thing. Unlucky for me, this was one of those times.
Read the full text of ‘Rumanye‘ by Sonia Sulaiman.
There was and was not a woman who kept a herd of goats. After spending the day milking the animals, she carefully poured the milk into a pan and set it to cook gently over her fire. As she was tired, she set her feet up and was soon napping. As she slept a little fox who happened to be passing by smelled the delicious, irresistibly sweet milk cooking unattended. Fox padded over silently, and once they were sure she was asleep, they began to sip the milk.
Read the full text of ‘How Fox Got His Tail Back’ by Sonia Sulaiman.
“We’re not history; we’re not even myth… We’re apocryphal.”
The Palestinians… The archives are emptied of her people. The university library has a lived-in sort of smell that makes itself so ubiquitous that it hardly registers as a smell anymore. Miri walks alone through the stacks, row after row of portals to worlds more wondrous than her own, searching for the one that will take her home. Somewhere among these spines there must be a key. There’s plenty of the Brothers Grimm, Andrew Lang, La Fontaine, and W.B. Yeats. There’s books on the morphology of magic, of the tale dissected and categorized.
Read ‘Tatreez’ by Sonia Sulaiman at Lackington’s Magazine.
I moved my hips in circles, small and large, vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. I held my arms out at my sides. I twisted my wrists. “Oh—“I sang. “Daughter of the vine…” The yellow earth shivered and opened as I twisted and swayed. My robe of silk and velvet, my short waist coat with the embroidery of the Foreign Eye and the Cow’s Eye and the Star of Bethlehem undulated with my body. A sprout broke through the surface of the earth. In a minute it was six inches long and soon it was a great twisting vine. Dark strands of bark peeled off the trunk in curls like a wild girl’s hair. And then I had enough grapes to fill my basket.
Read ‘The Witches of Ascalon’ by Sonia Sulaiman in Stone Root and Bone by Hagstone Press.
Or here.
A young woman sat in front of the prince and said: “when my grandparents were married, I was invited to their wedding.” The room rustled with velvet dresses making way for the storyteller, as if her words needed space to grow– they were so audacious. Strong sunlight penetrated the latticed windows stretching their dark wooden frames to arched ceilings where they gave way to expertly cut marble. Along the far walls hung thick tapestries of hunts and romantic abductions by moonlight.
Read ‘From Whole Cloth’ here.