The Falls of Us

The hardest part is not always what happened. Sometimes it is what comes after.

In The Falls of Us, E. M. Fowler traces the moment when private pain becomes public expectation and what happens when people are left to live with the consequences.

A teenage girl carries the shame of abuse within a rigid religious community. Her father loses standing in the same community that calls her the sinner, leaving him torn between what he has lost and the daughter he still loves. An aging woman moves through the shifting reality of dementia. A marriage strains beneath betrayal and denial. A woman of faith struggles with the truth behind the testimony others expect her to tell.

Across eighteen literary short stories, Black characters confront the things people cannot face when they happen, the memories they bend to survive, and the questions that return after there is no clean way forward.

Blending literary prose with speculative twists, The Falls of Us is a collection of microfiction, flash, and full-length short stories for readers of literary, speculative, and socially conscious fiction.