Did some people find graduation celebratory?
New fiction by Kion You
While for most people late May and early June mean the start of summer, for the scholastically affiliated the season has a more precise name: graduation. A time of bittersweet goodbyes, new beginnings, and miserable traffic, graduation is the subject of Kion You’s Issue Seventeen short story, narrated by a student whose difficult family has come to see him receive a graduate degree from a university in Texas. You’s poignant and sharply observed writing captures the exquisite melancholy of the one commencement in our language that is also an ending.
KION YOU
Once Hannah stopped picking up our mother’s calls, our mother started calling me instead, every day. I had only heard her cry once before, during the worst of her menopause, but now she wept constantly, excoriating our cousin’s ex-husband and repeating ad nauseum that such tragedy could not possibly have fallen on the fair-skinned.
