Features
The Don Magazine Features is an archive of writing drawn from across the magazine’s issues — a place to dip in and spend some time. Take a look at the fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews that have defined Don so far. You might revisit a favorite piece or come across something you missed the first time.
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Introduction to Creative Writing: Fiction
This week, try to write a confrontation story. As always, the story is due three days before the next class, so that your classmate can comment on them. Don’t comment using the documents’ Comments function, but use the footnotes section instead, so that they can be seen directly on the document. The stories are assigned randomly, so leave feedback on a story that you receive. Enjoy writing!
Masked On A Feeling
“I met someone,” she says, picking up the menu. My heart sinks. I watch as her eyes roam through the appetizers, silently trying to catch a feel of her. I wonder, for a moment, if she is waiting for me to ask the next obvious question. If she thinks I’m going to give her that luxury, she’s wrong. I pick up the menu as well. From the corner of my eye, I catch her stealing a glance at me for a brief second.
Am I Pretty?
The tale of kuchisake-onna goes something like this: a beautiful woman wearing a surgical mask asks you: “Am I pretty?” If you say no, she kills you with scissors, sometimes with a large knife, or a katana; if you say yes, she takes off the mask, revealing her grossly disfigured mouth and asks again: “Even now?” If you say no, you die…shocking. If you say yes, however, that’s where things get interesting. Some say she kills you anyway because she knows you’re lying. Others say she slashes your mouth so you look just like her. There are ways to escape, however feasible they may be: throw candy at her, say “pomade” three times, confuse her by telling her she’s average then run, or simply say you don’t have time and in true Japanese spirit, she will apologize and let you go on your way.
The Water I Wear: Kyoto Summer Skin
Morning has a weight before it has a colour.
I open the glass sliding door and Kyoto summer climbs onto my skin. I drink a glass of ice-cold water and it dresses my hands. The rim leaves a circle on the table and I press my palm into it. I already wear my summer mask.
On the street I carry the small sentences I can hold: ohayō, sumimasen, arigatō gozaimasu. Sometimes the grammar fogs and I bow a little too long. My cheeks bloom a little hotter.
My First Day
It was a hot day, nearly too hot, because my god, it was humid, and I was sick. That awful kind of sick where you aren’t so bad that you can’t get up and do things but so sick that every nerve is alight with fever-like sensitivity. I wanted to grind my fist into my head to stop the pounding, or just give up completely and turn tail.
The Hunt
The fire had died down to embers and the wind shifted slightly, blowing the smoke westward out of camp. I shuffled my feet in the dirt as I looked up at the sky. Grandfather knew the names and histories of the stars; he used to tell their stories when I was still too young to understand. Father says he wishes he had listened to them, because now when he looks up to Grandfather’s ghost, he has no idea what it is trying to tell him. When I ask Grandmother if she knows, she smiles and hugs me; she doesn’t say much at all anymore. Mother says her ghost has already left to be with Grandfather, and when I ask what she means, she says that I need to wash the cooking pot and to please stop pestering her. It was a full moon, which meant it was bright enough that I didn’t need to keep the fire burning to see, but Mother says I should do it anyway, because the fire is all that separates us from the wild.
Ketchup: No Open Food or Drink in the Library
“You’re a lil’ squishy piece of shit aren’t you, all high and mighty wrapped up on your bourgeois packaging. I mean, what the hell do you even think is in here?”
The Devil Jars
As a scholar traveling through foreign lands, I am always suspicious. It is physically healthier to be so. I don't listen to proclamations about miracle cures or celestial orgasms anymore. I doubt first, and then weigh the chances. Suspicion also helps me keep an appropriate distance on events, in order to observe and see objects, people and behaviors as they should be witnessed: in the third person. But, I can recall one occasion when I threw off my rule and let myself inhale exotic logics.
Bleeding Heart
I had a friend in high school, he lived in my neighborhood and we rode the same bus together every day. I don’t know how it happened exactly; though it was one of those friendships that just seem to form as a matter of fact, not much to go off of but we knew we would be best friends for life from the moment we met. Every chance we got, we would be over at his house playing games just chit-chatting the hours away — talking about the game we were playing, school, teachers, crushes, life, anything.
Apples Did Fall After All
There’s an image that descends on my mind every summer when the cicadas start singing and the heat haze starts ascending from the asphalt. An image of my mom walking next to my hunched grandmother, supporting her back and guiding her gently as they slowly climb a gentle slope. I remember walking behind them as a little girl, following them from a distance. To where, I don’t quite remember.