Fiction

Our Lady of the Scales

By Mélanie Fazi

November 2018
Mélanie Fazi

Photo: Michael Gaida/Pixabay Following a hysterectomy, a woman is drawn to the gothic ambience of a stone statuary garden at her lover’s family’s home. My third sleepless night in t...
Health for All

By Yoss

November 2018
Yoss

Illustration by Jen Rickard Blair For “El Negro” Fontanarrosa, for his lawless fat men . . . A 2050 public health campaign goes too far, resulting in allergy-free municipalities, fines for obes...
The First Day

By Goli Taraghi

November 2018
Goli Taraghi

The doctor knows about my love of writing. She brings me a handful of white paper and some sharp pencils. I sit at the table and am frozen. What should I write? How? Where should I begin?...
Trio

By Jeanne Farewell

September 2018
Jeanne Farewell

A backbiting violin section, duettists whose honest feedback to one another is less welcome than first thought, and a tuner who sets a pianist on edge: in this trio of short fictions, m...
Jóhanna Mørk

By Jóanes Nielsen

September 2018
Jóanes Nielsen

Photo: James Stringer/Flickr A chance encounter with a magnetic stranger shifts something inside the narrator of this story set in the streets of Tórshavn. I first met her around th...
Black Cadillac

By Milena Solot

September 2018
Milena Solot

Photo: Steve Oprey/Pixabay In this story from Milena Solot’s manuscript A Possible Place, the recently named matron of a successful whorehouse in Mexico City walks into the car...
Summer with Halla

By Sólrún Michelsen

September 2018
Sólrún Michelsen

A small birch tree with arctic thyme, lupine, sea thrift, angelica, marsh marigolds, welsh poppies, oriental poppies, rhubarb and red currant. Watercolor by Roshni Robert A woman’s comp...
The Cadillac

By Sylvie Weil

July 2018
Sylvie Weil

Photo: Chris Devers/Flickr A bar mitzvah brings multiple generations of a family together in celebration, far from the reach of the evil eye. NEW ROCHELLE...
De Beauvoir and Sartre on the Kibbutz

By Moshe Sakal

July 2018
Moshe Sakal

Photo: Sarah McGee/Flickr While visiting a kibbutz to give a lecture, and after dining on both hot desert-root vegetable soup and sushi, the speaker becomes the listener when someone in...
Ancient History

By Rodrigo Fresán

May 2018
Rodrigo Fresán

Blood War, 2016, by Jia How Lee. The concept art is based on the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Years ago the man got married and years ago the man became unhappy in his marriage. T...
Annus Mirabilis (Anus Horribilis)

By Aleksey Lukyanov

May 2018
Aleksey Lukyanov

Photo: Skitterphoto/Pixabay Outside the Special Instrument Factory, protesters rally against war, corruption, and the latest in protective head gear: the Ex-Box. Procrustes-1 was t...
A Perfect Wife

By Angélica Gorodischer

May 2018
Angélica Gorodischer

illustration by Michael Vincent Manalo Anything might happen beyond a door opened by a perfect wife. to the memory of María Varela Osorio If you should meet her on the street, cro...
The Tenants

By Anne Richter

May 2018
Anne Richter

Photo: Daria Nepriakhina/Pixabay T he old man lived in a vast, dark house, windows blind with frosted glass, door adorned with a heavy bronze knocker. At one time or another, all five of his children...
The House

By Pierrette Fleutiaux

May 2018
Pierrette Fleutiaux

Duo III, 2013, oil on canvas by André Schulze Courtesy of the artist/andreschulze.com A mother inside, a daughter outside. Has her mother shrunk, or has she always been...
I Have the Right to Be a Stranger

By Inaya Jaber

March 2018
Inaya Jaber

photo: arcaion/pixabay After work, my friend and I go to the Café de Prague in the heart of the Hamra district. As we sit at a table by the large window, looking out on the lighted street, I think a...
The Pillar of Salt

By Zsuzsa Takács

January 2018
Zsuzsa Takács

After deciding to end it all, a woman takes a final subway ride. Z, the story writer, decided to end her diary. What is more, with an eye on approaching Christmas, she would adorn it with s...
In Nocere

By Laura Legge

January 2018
Laura Legge

Through story and stranger, two fallen-out friends mediate their way back to one another in the Edinburgh Zoo. M eet me in the waves, you bad fisherman, and I will give you Death by Water. T...
Equations of State

By Kristine Ong Muslim

January 2018
Kristine Ong Muslim

And somewhere in all these, all these possible variants of the bus-taking crowd, was Karl, who would appear from out of nowhere, and I would be the only one who could see him. I did not kn...
The Trial of Socrates (an excerpt)

By Alex Stein

November 2017
Alex Stein

Photo: Pixabay Using Socrates’ trial as his point of departure, the author spins out a meditation on wisdom, the divine, justice, grace, and desire like “an arrow in the chest.” “We cann...
Checking out the Apartment

By Montasser Al-Qaffash

November 2017
Montasser Al-Qaffash

An apartment on the bank of the Nile River for a fair price sounds like a no-brainer, unless that apartment happens to be right next to one of the most infamous prisons in Egypt. Th...
#Moving

By María José Navia

November 2017
María José Navia

Photo: Katherine Dewey Hill This story begins with three @ handles and ends with two.With a single hashtag, repeated insistently like a mantra...
The Binding of Isaac

By Stephen Mitchell

November 2017
Stephen Mitchell

Menashe Kadishman (1932–2015), The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1985, cor-ten steel, 15' 1" x 15' 5" x 9'. Kadishman’s sculpture “was partly inspired by an experience the artist had while se...
The History of Grains

By Gianni Skaragas

September 2017
Gianni Skaragas

Life jackets and a boat used by refugees and migrants to cross the Aegean Sea from Turkey lie abandoned on the Greek island of Lesbos (Photo: Aris Messinis / AFP / Getty Images) An intimate yet u...
We Were the New Era

By Andreas Baum

September 2017
Andreas Baum

Photo: Daniel Krieg In post-unification Berlin, groups of squatters compete for empty housing. Who will gain the upper hand? The next morning, a group of angry men were standing in...
Made Flesh

By Alit Karp

September 2017
Alit Karp

Illustration: flickr.com / xyzquantumpoet A Lutheran seminary student wonders what it takes to become a Jew for his girlfriend, whose embrace is “not a preface to anything else.” I ...