Fiction

Lalalà

By Bel Olid

Winter 2020
Bel Olid

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 fr...
The Other Woman

By Bibiana Camacho

Winter 2020
Bibiana Camacho

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...
Vocations

By Miguel Gomes

Winter 2020
Miguel Gomes

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...
Is the Horse Oppressed?

By Mirza Athar Baig

Autumn 2019
Mirza Athar Baig

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 stran...
The Moon through the Hard Water: America Doesn’t Like Me

By Zsuzsa Selyem

Autumn 2019
Zsuzsa Selyem

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 M...
The Unsevered Tongue

By Dipika Mukherjee

Autumn 2019
Dipika Mukherjee

Photo: Zoltan Tasi / Unsplash A 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...
The Grand Experiment

By Alberto Chimal

Summer 2019
Alberto Chimal

Birds Watching, by Jenny Kendler, part of Indicators: Artists on Climate Change at Storm King Art Center, depicts one hundred eyes of bird species threatened or endangered by cl...
The Wig

By Sepideh Zamani

Summer 2019
Sepideh Zamani

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. ...
Beginners

By Mika Seifert

Summer 2019
Mika Seifert

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 ei...
Roses and Jasmine

By Myronn Hardy

Summer 2019
Myronn Hardy

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,...
Holes

By Clelia Farris

Spring 2019
Clelia Farris

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. ...
God’s Intern

By Namrata Verghese

Winter 2019
Namrata Verghese

Photo: Bishnu Sarangi A 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...
The Talus of Madame Liken

By Asja Bakić

Winter 2019
Asja Bakić

Photo: NettPix/Pixabay In 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...
Auntie Nabat’s Bread

By Nariman Hasanzade

Winter 2019
Nariman Hasanzade

Photo: Wine Dharma/UNsplash In 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. B...
Four Fabulist Fables

By Pierre Bettencourt

Winter 2019
Pierre Bettencourt

“Gravity” by Dani Montesinos Feet 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 togethe...
If You’d Only Look

By Sonya Chyu

Winter 2019
Sonya Chyu

llustration by Shanti Sparrow A 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 ti...
Closer to Where You Will Find Him

By Michael Mattes

November 2018
Michael Mattes

Photo: Erkan Utu/Pexels What I see upon entering a hospital room in St. Paul at dawn. My nieces asleep, one on a cot against the wall, the other in a chair beside the bed, holding my sister’...
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...