Excerpt from Fleury’s fiction book: It’s Always Sunrise Somewhere and Other Stories]
Jislene scurries around her apartment determined not to be defeated by the Haitian Time Curse to always be late. She is married to a White man and living—what looks like to most outsiders—the American dream in the suburb of Lakeville, Massachusetts while her only daughter is away at university.
Now, in her red convertible with the top down and the wind in her straight black hair, she is listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” from her debut album just released. She sings along with the lyrics: “You got a fast car; maybe together we can get somewhere. Maybe we make a deal, starting from nothing got nothing to lose…” She smiles to herself as she anticipates seeing the girls since they only meet once a month.
First there is Gilda, a gregarious gal who’s constantly laughing, even at things most people don’t even find funny. Betsy is a yoyo dieter. Her husband often mocks her by making “BooBoom Booboom Booboom” sounds when she walks in public, which Betsy always pretends to laugh off and then cries herself to sleep at night. Wanda, an Arabic woman who always wears a head wrap and covered up in layers of clothes leaving only her face and hands visible to the public, to appease her Arabic husband. Polish Paula, at 25 with blond hair and blue eyes, is the youngest of the group with a curvaceous hourglass figure that most middle-aged men would mortgage a house for.
Jislene arrives just as the sun is setting over her rural surroundings. She pushes through the door left ajar with an apologetic half smile on her face for always being late. “Bonsoir and sorry ladies, I really tried hard not to be late this time,” she says in her Haitian accent. “Oh, Jislene. Next time, I’ll have to send a time police to your house to handcuff you and bring you here on time?” Gilda utters laughingly. “Sweety, you think I would waste my time with you bitches if you sent me a uniformed stallion to play with?” Jislene tilts her head back and laughs.
“Ladies, I take it you all have finished the book? I know I did and it was a fascinating read please, sit,” Betsy declares. “I particularly like the title ‘Mother, Lover, Murderer.’ I also found it to be quite relevant to the plight of modern women to free themselves from male domination, don’t you?” They all sit in Betsy’s living room and commence sipping tea and coffee.
“Oh, yes…I’ve known plenty of women who have been pushed to the edge to…you know, have reason to kill,” says Jislene as she looks nervously around the room, avoiding direct eye contact with the other women while she sips her coffee. “I found the sex scenes to be quite tantalizing indeed….” Wanda chuckles as she looks around at the women.
“You of all people? Walking around all covered up like a mummy? You almost had me thinking that all you do in bed is pray!”” says Jislene, which invokes laughter from the women. “My favorite part was when Marla murdered her husband. I think it was justified since he practically enslaved her. I mean, who ties someone’s arms and legs to bed posts and then continuously act out mock rape scenes just for kicks and then afterwards expect her to cook his dinner and draw his bath. I would kill the motherfucker too if I was in that situation.” Spitballs are flying out of Jislene’s mouth and the veins in her neck are visibly throbbing as she practically barks out the words. Wanda squirms uncomfortably in her seat as she watches Jislene speak. Gilda laughs, but it almost seems forced. And at that very moment, a hissing sound can be heard coming from the kitchen, and Betsy—welcoming the distraction—stands up and asks, “More tea anyone?” Everyone said no.
“Well, I definitely think that the son of a bitch got what he deserved,” offers Paula. “Now you can understand why I use my looks to manipulate the hell out of those assholes and clean out their bank accounts by the time I am done with them. Sex appeal is my ultimate weapon against those pigs and he better be packing no less than eight and a half inches if he wants to slip his key into my lock.” Paulo tilts her head in a brief forward and backward motion to accentuate her point. And all the women drop their jaws and raise their eyebrows in Paula’s direction.
“Well, my Charlie has his asshole moments, especially when he pokes fun of my weight, but for the most part he is good to me. As long as I do what he wants and try not to piss him off with back talk, we’re good. So what if he wants me to cook and clean in full make-up and high heels when he is around. I like to surrender to his 1950’s housewife fantasies,” Betsy says in a low resigned voice. As the ladies take turns talking, the moon can be seen hovering behind a cloud outside the living room window and the sizzling summer night air, which has seeped into the house—feels stifling and Betsy responds by turning on the ceiling fan.
“My husband is fucking my brother!” Wanda exclaims and all eyes turn to her in shock and disbelief. “As you know my brother has been staying with me since his divorce. Now I know why the marriage didn’t work!” The ladies are all silent and shocked. Paula speaks first, “Your macho male chauvinist husband? What makes you think…I mean…do you have any proof?”
“Well, one day I came home and my brother came out of our bedroom bare-chested, sweaty and buttoning up his pants, and I could hear Slav scurrying around our bedroom and when I quickly poke my head in, he too was half naked trying to get his pants on. They both said half in unison that they were just wrestling with each other. Which I thought was a crack of shit!” Wanda leans forward with her right hand on her right thigh and cupped under her chin as she looks down at the floor. Outside, the moon is still slowly trying to evade the dense cloud that obliterates it and the windows are illuminated slightly by its fluorescent glow and rattling a bit from the growing wind. All the women are silent for a brief moment and the sound of crickets can be heard coming from the nearby woods. “What are you gonna do now Wanda?” Gilda asks.
“I don’t know. The women in my family never even consider divorce” Wanda says as she looks off in the distance. And then suddenly, like she just became infused with a sudden boost of manic energy, declares “But you know what, I think I’m gonna be the first. I’m going to divorce his faggot ass!” Then she stands up, yanks the head wrap from her head, takes off the long robe to expose a tight strapless red dress she wore underneath and all the women gasps in utter bewilderment and then suddenly begin clapping while Wanda takes a number of bows as if she’d just given the performance of a lifetime. “This is the kind of clothes I am going to wear from now on,” she says in a triumphant fashion. And with that, they adjourned the meeting.
As Jislene drives home, she is content to think that the ladies don’t really know her or what she has done. They don’t know that she is a serial black widow and that she has killed every man she’d ever married because they all reminded her of her father. She had been raped and sexually abused by her dad—while her mother looked the other way—since she was just five years old to the age of sixteen when she finally mustered the courage to run away from home. They don’t know that as she is driving home, she plans to stop by the store to buy more arsenic to prepare her current husband’s dinner. They don’t know that she has been physically and mentally abused by every man she’d ever married since running away from home, including her current one.
Would they judge her to be a bad person if they knew about the killings? After all, isn’t she the real victim here? They don’t know that the book they are reading was written by Jislene herself under a pen name. “It just goes to show,” She thinks to herself, “’our secrets are what constitute who we really are.”
As she shifts the gears of her stick shift, the moon finally peaks from under the heavy-handed mass of clouds to illuminate the dark highway on which she had driven many times on her way home from her book club.
Jacques Fleury
Jacques Fleury is a Boston Globe featured and internationally published Haitian American poet, theater reviewer, educator, author of numerous books of essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and literary arts student through Harvard University. He was chosen among over 4, 000 competitors from 83 countries as the Recipient of the International Naji Naaman Literary Prize for Creativity (2026) and a Certificate of Participation for his “…esteemed contribution of poetry to the anthology Water: The Source of Life (Volume IV) presented by La Fenetre De Paris.
Jacques Fleury’s book You Are Enough: The Journey Towards Understanding Your Authentic Self
It’s Always Sunrise Somewhere and Other Stories among other titles are available at all Massachusetts public libraries, the University of Massachusetts Healey Library, Wyoming University, Askews and Holts Library Services, the leading library supply specialist in the United Kingdom, The MIT Press Bookstore, The Harvard Bookstore and the oldest poetry bookstore in America: The Grolier Poetry Book Shop (est. 1927) has hosted great American poets E. E. Cummings and Alan Ginsberg and online bookstores worldwide such as Bookshop dot com, Amazon etc…
Parents take care of the responsibilities from the side.
Country: India,
Date:18.06.2026
Amb. Dr. Priyanka Neogi is from Coochbehar. She is an administrative controller of United Nations’ PAF, a librarian, a CEO of Lio Messi International Property & Land Consultancy, international literacy worker, sports & peace promoter, dancer, singer, reciter, live telecaster, writer, editor, researcher, literary journalist, host, beauty queen, international co-ordinator of the Vijay Mission of Community Welfare Foundation of India.
J.J. Campbell (1976 – ?) is trapped in suburbia, plotting his escape. He’s been widely published over the last 30 years, most recently at The Rye Whiskey Review, The Beatnik Cowboy, Yellow Mama, Night Owl Narrative and Mad Swirl. You can find his latest book, to live your dreams, on Amazon by going here: https://a.co/d/0aaEe8ph
World War 1 was over for over a week now. Peace had been declared after all was gone. We somehow managed to stay strong and hide in the basements below which were dark and hauntingly silent. Darkness everywhere – down there and in everyone’s life. Mightiest of the buildings fell down burnt, hands and heads popping out from rubble. Heaps of dead people were seen – some soldiers, some civilians but everyone a helpless victim. We lost our house, and many dear ones. We were senseless and numb as we grieved our loss.
I went today without telling my wife. I hadn’t spoken a word since days and I didn’t know what to do, what to feel and so I went to my school – the place my heaven before this war began.
I was shaken by a thought – if my school had collapsed, even the slightest hope of happiness would vanish. On the way, I saw the destroyed lanes, and people wailing somewhere now and then. My heart was beating fast – one turn in and there it would be in front of me.
I closed my eyes and stood there in front of it. As I immediately opened them, I slipped into an abyss as the ground swallowed me. The school building was gone – collapsed into powder and stones. I walked over those remains, and now I couldn’t control myself. My lips trembled, and my jaw was completely frozen as I kept my hand on my mouth and wept.
I could hear the school bell ring, and me standing outside the class – late as always. Now there was a test in the second period, and I did my best to copy the topper in front of me without getting caught. I missed those teachers who gave me piles of homework – they were a villain then, and now I want them to torture me again. I missed those social science periods where I used to get my beauty sleep, and those mathematics lectures I struggled to understand. I wanted to dance just like how I did when we were taken to the science lab, but now life has left me with nothing to celebrate.
“Come back my mates – let’s play again and run around, let’s beat each other once again, I want to steal your lunchbox again – your mom makes fabulous sandwiches,” I whispered as my voice broke while crying. All those faces flashed in front of my eyes – so many would have been killed in the war, and I wanted them to come and meet me again.
I bent down as my knees trembled, and took small stones and particles of my destroyed heaven back to the home which I had lost now. What can I say? What is left to say?
My Son Returned Home
She has wept a lot,
All tears gone now,
Dried,
Her fate now, her life now.
Today he will come home,
Killed,
Behind stood the neighbour, keeping a hand on her shoulder,
Two mothers at the same corner of life.
They both had come,
Both of them to sleep forever.
The neighbour’s son gave his life to his country,
Her son dared touch someone’s daughter.
Everybody stood there, fake tears in judging eyes,
They saluted the neighbour,
And looked at her with disgust,
Her stained womb.
All blamed her,
Raised fingers on her upbringing,
“Poor girl died,
Someone didn’t teach her son morals”.
Nobody understood her, her life,
The storms she fought to raise him up,
The neighbour’s cry a river of gems,
Her giving birth a crime.
The neighbour though never left her side,
She stood by her in all those pains,
She wept with her,
She wiped her tears, she understood those, she felt them.
“You have indebted me forever,” she said one day,
The neighbour smiled, only she knew a woman’s duty,
“They be fools, which mother teaches wrong,
Bereavement is bereavement.”
Shlok Pandey is a 17-year-old Indian writer who is a student of a completely different field and practices writing and reading in the very little spare time he can manage from his studies. He writes literary fiction and poems focused on human relationships, nature, daily life observations, human psychology and everyday emotional experiences. His stories have appeared in the Wise Owl Magazine, Setu Journal, Synchronized Chaos, The Drift and Dribble Miscellany and Wildflower Post and his poems have appeared in/ forthcoming in The Crossroads Review, cloudymoon lit mag, The Utrecht Pigeon Magazine, Poetic Practice and aesterion magazine. Instagram – @iamshlokp.
Nidia Amelia García, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, is a writer and an active member of Juntos por las Letras (Together for Letters). She has participated in numerous virtual events in Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Spain, Colombia, Portugal, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and elsewhere. She has also contributed to literary anthologies such as “Books of the Immortals” and “Anthology of the 50 Poets of the World 2022.”
