by Yasmina Din Madden

The child on the side of the road is dirty and alone, so Jimmy and I cross to her but don’t get too close. When she looks up at us there is no fear, far more alarming than if she cried or cowered. Beneath a layer of dust, her hair is the yellow of cornsilk. The road is empty but for the three of us. I ask her the questions you ask a lost child now: Are your parents alive? How long have you been walking? Do you remember where you’re from? Do you know if you had the shots?

Yasmina Din Madden is a Vietnamese American writer who lives in Iowa. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in The Idaho Review, PANK, Carve, The Masters Review, The Fairy Tale Review, Necessary Fiction, and other journals. She is the winner of the 2022 Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, and her short fiction has been a finalist for The Iowa Review Award in Fiction, and nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.