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Nazish Nasim's avatar

Your writing was like someone switched on a movie in front of my eyes. It's a hallmark of great writing. It echoed what we have all been feeling in these turbulent times. Whether it is in the U.S., or Europe, or the Middle East. And I do not want this comment to devolve into politics, but this story does tug on the general chaos of our times. Things that command our attention vs. things that should.

I love the layers of struggle and meaning in this story, Jonathan. A deep and contemplative, read.

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Kimberly Warner's avatar

This piece gripped me with its eerie, aching inevitability—a story that unspools like a flood itself, rising in slow, creeping waves before sweeping everything away. It moved me in the way only great writing does: by making me feel both small and complicit, caught in the current of history, of power, of regret. The narrator’s blindness, their failure to pay attention, is our own—our human tendency to cling to illusions, to mistake argument for action, to build walls of facts instead of listening. And then there are the ghosts, the weight of the past bearing down on the present, demanding reckoning. The final image—cows swallowed by the water, voices drowned out, the ghosts reaching—left me breathless. It’s not just a haunting story; it’s a reckoning, a warning, a lament for what has already been lost and what is still slipping away.

I think I’ll go cry now.

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