Tag: compliance

They Tell Us

By Dawn Tasaka Steffler

I

Wait until buyer’s remorse sets in
Wait until it hurts the farmers
Until it hurts the veterans
Until the social security checks stop coming
Until they take away birthright citizenship
Until they take away freedom of speech
Until they take away the vote from women
Until another pandemic rears its head and hundreds of thousands die again

Whispers circulate
But what if we don’t want to wait?
Where are the protests?
What are we so afraid of?

Actually we are very afraid
We only act brave

II

They tell us we are the sleeping bear
And you know what they say
You don’t want to poke a sleeping bear

And one of us asks in a clear young voice
Why don’t we want to poke the bear?
If we wake the sleeping bear won’t the nightmare end?
Everyone nods their heads in agreement

They tell us
No, we’re going to roll over and play dead

Wait, are we a sleeping bear or a dead bear?

III

They tell us wait until the midterms
If they want to hang themselves give them plenty of rope
Don’t stand in the way of the process

Perplexed we look to our left and our right
to the person standing next to us

One of us whispers
I don’t think they know what they’re doing
This has never happened before

Ah- but it has
another one of us whispers
Just not here

Dawn Tasaka Steffler (she/her) is an Asian-American writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a Smokelong Quarterly Emerging Writer Fellow, winner of the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and was selected for both the 2024 Wigleaf Top 50 long list and 2025 Best Small Fictions. Her stories appear in Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, Moon City Review, The Forge, JMWW, and more. She is working on a novella-in-flash that explores the challenges and joys of parenting queer kids. Find her online at dawntasakasteffler.com and on X, BlueSky and Instagram @dawnsteffler.

Photo credit: Ged Carroll via a Creative Commons license.

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What True Crime Podcasts Have Taught Me

By Esha Khimji

  1. My husband/boyfriend is most likely to kill me
  2. If he doesn’t and some other man does, people will remember his name and forget mine
  3. Blue Apron is a quick and easy way to cook
  4. I have been socialised to be too polite and accommodating and that’s what will get me killed
  5. I will also be killed if I try to set boundaries
  6. If I date a younger man, he will definitely kill me for my money and I will be unforgivably naive for thinking a younger man found me attractive
  7. Blue Apron is a quick and easy way to cook
  8. If I am murdered, the best I’ll get is pity and the worst I’ll get is too fucked up to mention here
  9. I need to double and triple check my phone is, in fact, connected to my Bluetooth headphones lest I traumatize everyone on my morning commute
  10. If my murderer is halfway decent looking, he will have fans
  11. The police won’t do anything until I am actually dead
  12. The police especially won’t do anything because I am not a pretty white girl
  13. I can listen to more podcasts on the Wondery App
  14. Blue Apron is a quick and easy way to cook

Esha Khimji is a new writer living in Scotland. She holds a degree in Economic and Social History, works a 9-to-5, and writes to stay sane. Her writing focuses on themes of self-preservation in the face of inequality and its interplay with desires that stretch past “one’s lot in life.” Her work has recently appeared in Short Beasts and Steam Ticket: A Third Coast Review.

Photo credit: Photo by Omar Ramadan on Unsplash.

A note from Writers Resist
Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist on our Give a Sawbuck page.