“Taboo” immediately gives us a connection to the narrator: visceral and particular descriptions of a boy in a refugee camp. The story—the characters in their situation—never wavers in its assurance. The writer very economically sets up a series of very human conflicts—of age, culture, gender, privilege—without resorting to easy cliché. They leave the reader to ache with ten year-old Timothy and, alongside him, wonder what will happen.

Samantha Edmonds' fiction and nonfiction appears in Day One, Pleiades, Indiana Review, the Ploughshares blog, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. She currently lives in Knoxville, where she's an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee. Visit her...