Photo: Elia Pellegrini / Unsplash
Over time you realize that the only thing you can do is to comfort. Before my grandmother passed, having already dwindled away, she would hold my hand tightly and sa…
Fiction
Photo: Oxa Roxa / Unsplash Looking for her dead wife, a woman finds an unusual bonsai with mythical connections and a few complaints. Laurel, without shoes, wandered aimlessly from one end o…
Portrait number four from Second Skins Collection, photography by Miguel Vallinas Prieto In this Kafkaesque story, two startling discoveries follow the transformation of a man’s environm…
Photo: Mark Gunn / Flickr Papa received a scythe from a co-worker as a present. Mama is horrified. “A scythe in our house?” Papa wants to reassure her: “I’ve set it in the cellar.” “For god’s sake i…
Photo: Oxa Roxa / Unsplash The students noticed an opening at the bottom of the fence, a tear in the wires. On the other side of the fence was the outside, which they only saw from the bus window…
Photo: cyclonebill / Flickr In this political satire, an innocent meal becomes a bureaucratic nightmare. The maître d’, who was called over by the waiter, asked: “Is there a problem, Sir?” “…
Photo: Rachel Lees / Unsplash A couple in their kitchen. Either the man or the woman speaks first. We should make sure they’ve inspected the car. I guess they probably only rent car…
Photo: Zhenyu Luo / Unsplash Down the first twist of stairs and Josie hears she is not alone, like hearing a tree in the wind beyond her bedroom window. The old man: splay-legged before his door like…
Photo: Mark Eder / Unsplash Margherita was tiny and hunched. She had light eyes, and always—summer or winter—wore a shawl she kept closed on her chest with her hand, as if clutching a necklace. She l…
Painting by Sara Jimenez In this story by an indigenous writer from the southern Philippines, a crime continues to haunt a local’s thoughts. It had been some time since Lolo Bebe passed away…
Photo: Sarah C / Flickr She makes the little balls with extreme care, as if for a sphericity contest, and then she puts each one next to the other. This order, which she must disturb to fry them,…
Photo: Omid Armin / Unsplash A stalled train and shifting visage make for an eerie commute. I could’ve stayed in bed a little longer, but what for? Surely that would only make things worse.…
Photo: Cory Doctorow / Flickr What a world. In life we have to make choices, face the most loathsome decisions; and, there up ahead, all you see are forks in the road. Hang a left, or maybe a right.…
Photo: Victor Grabarczyk / Unsplash An encounter between a tonga driver and the “cruelty folks” seizes a university student’s attention on his way to class. Sometimes I remember strange thin…
Photo: Ray Hennessy / Unsplash In May 1974, in New York’s René Block Gallery at 409 West Broadway, Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) carried out his performance “I Like America and America Likes Me.” Arr…
Photo: Zoltan Tasi / UnsplashA mother’s conflict with her daughter causes her to reflect on Khawnaa, a mathematician-astrologer and light of the Bengali medieval court. When my daughter rais…
Photo: Philipp Bock/Flickr Banned from entering soccer stadiums since Iran’s 1979 revolution, the young women in this story hatch a risky plan to get inside the stadium on game day. She had…
Photo: Jordan Whitt/Unsplash In this coming-of-age tale with a dark twist, two brothers engage in a deathly game. MY BROTHER LEMMY taught me how to die. I was then eight, an…
Photo: Annie Pratt/Unsplash While on a pilgrimage to the site of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia, which sparked the Arab Spring, the narrator meditates on revolution, death, and imm…
Un Uovo Vuoto, illustration by Damiano Cenderelli Italian sci-fi master Clelia Farris conjures a solitary egglike being and the company eager to provide a piercing solution. I AM T…
Photo: Bishnu SarangiA girl is forced to reexamine the myths surrounding her aunt when her aunt moves in with the family in Texas after leaving her husband in India. Is she more goddess, more witc…
Photo: NettPix/PixabayIn this story from Asja Bakić’s debut collection, Mars, two women exist in a dangerous symbiosis. Lichen: nature’s chaos. A body of algae and mushroom, the symb…
Photo: Wine Dharma/UNsplashIn his bildungsroman, the “People’s Poet of Azerbaijan” describes a time when “all the world smelled of bread.” I’d taken off my clothes and climbed into bed. But I…
“Gravity” by Dani MontesinosFeet to Feet My wife and I have a way of sleeping that might seem a bit bizarre: neither face-to-face nor back-to-back, but with the soles of our feet pressed together. O…
llustration by Shanti SparrowA nine-year-old wonders whether her story of a publicly shamed elephant is responsible for her immigrant mother’s mysterious condition. O nce upon a recent time,…