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?...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
Cliff jumping at Tenkiller Lake, August 2011. Photo: Rachel Folmar
A teenager finds himself living in the shadow of his lover’s deceased boyfriend.
Cordell stopped by the gallery to drop off...
Photo: Kai C. Schwarzer
A relationship is put to the test when a young couple visits a family member on an isolated island.
We left home to think it over. Nanna had an abortion three years a...