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’…
Fiction
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…
Illustration by Jen Rickard BlairFor “El Negro” Fontanarrosa, for his lawless fat men . . . A 2050 public health campaign goes too far, resulting in allergy-free municipalities, fines for obesity,…
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…
Photo: Katherine Dewey Hill This story begins with three @ handles and ends with two.With a single hashtag, repeated insistently like a mantra…
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…
