by Dave Nash
I saw you waiting at the front of the platform, I inched up closer. I hung behind the other commuters who allowed me anonymity. I strained for a better look.
I saw you on a good day, a lucid moment from my ennui; yesterday I would have put my head in my phone and waited for the train to pull in.
Read More »by Ramona Gore
Emi exhaled into the night, her breath quickly condensed by the cold air. She buried her icy hands even deeper into her pockets in an attempt to regain some warmth in her fingertips. Her cheeks had surely turned pink by now and the padding in her thick coat provided little relief from the brick wall she leaned against. Just as she was about to call it quits, he stepped out of the doorway she stood next to.
Read More »by Willow Page Delp
It was cold.
Piper was the embodiment of cold-resistant, sleeping without covers on cool sheets as she sweat through her pajamas. She was always sweltering — tying her dust-colored hair into a ponytail as perspiration gathered on the nape of her neck, slashing off the sleeves of her school uniform, keeping the ceiling fan spinning twenty-four-seven — much to her roommate’s chagrin.
When Opal saw the fan on, she would grumble, retreat into an oversized hoodie, and bury herself in her blankets, like a tunneling animal. Their arrangement was built on the fraught compromise, temperature-wise, but the balance was never mutual agreement — something closer to a ceasefire.
But, this morning, even Piper had to admit it was cold.
Read More »by William Cass
The Madison was old, red-brick, and smoke-stained on its far side from the chimneys of a nearby factory that had closed a decade ago. The building’s five stories housed a few dozen cramped, drab apartments, a few of which also served as places of business: a seamstress, a child care provider, an online counselor, a call center rep, a translator. Its small foyer was dimly lit and had no doorman. An elevator occupied most of the wall across from the front doors bordered by a plate glass window that looked out onto the sidewalk and street. A potted artificial ficus stood like a sentinel at the base of the third wall, and a bank of mailboxes filled the fourth.
Read More »by Cecilia Kennedy
When the kya, kya, he, he, shoosh, shoosh labor-breathing ended, a tiny thing entered this world on a string. Nurses had to pull her down from the ceiling. I never even got a chance to hold her.
“It’s rare,” the doctors said, “but it happens,” and they rattled off something about the displacement of oxygen in a pair of human lungs and chromosomes and genes and splices of things, but in the end, the outcome was clear: my child would float through the world.
Read More »by Smrithi Senthilnathan
“Ready for our movie marathon tonight?” she asks.
I smile. “As long as you don’t put any heartbreaking movies, I’m game. Not in the mood to cry today.”
She punches me softly. “Just because I love sad movies doesn’t mean I don’t know anything else. Today you’ll meet another side of me.” She winked and smiled at me coyly. I shook my head, laughing as I followed her into my room, better known as our den.
“Today I’m choosing the first movie of the night,” I declare, closing the door behind me.
Read More »by Modesty Sanchez
Read More »With every passing minute, every punitive increase in temperature, every dreary mile of unchanging desert, we were brought closer and closer to our destination.
by Blanka Pillár
I forgive him for the little lies. The little fibs that slip away and the broken promises that go unkept. He always tells the same lies, and sometimes I believe him, because the story paints itself like a vivid oil portrait; first the figures are painted, then the background, then the corners, edges, contours, and finally it becomes as if it were a real scene on the canvas of life, but only the immensity of human imagination has made believable what could never be real. It tells me what I most desire, and so I reach for it with all my heart, stretching out the arms of my soul to preserve all that its lips say, and to hold it within me for eternity. I love him with all my heart, but when my reality is keen-eyed, it sometimes smells like the scratch of jagged-edged infidelities in the dawning dawn or the wistful night. The cold realisation slips into bed beside me, or touches me as I walk.
Read More »by Jasna Dimitrijević (translated from Serbian by John K. Cox)
The rain woke me up. It intervened in my dream, and at first I didn’t know where in the world I was. Then I was swimming in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. I know it was the Pacific, because I recognized it from shows on TV. I swam through turquoise and crystal. That’s what they say in the travel pieces, turquoise and crystal. From my hips hang decorative beads attached to my bathing suit. I remember it from photographs. My first bathing suit, a kid’s one. The clouds burst as I fix the knot in my hair. Heavy drops plop onto my scalp and my outstretched hands. They grow thicker and heavier until water covers the entire world. It envelops me like an endless hug, an impenetrable womb. I kick my legs around so that I can swim vertically, and at that point I wake up. That was a shame. I would like to learn how to swim. But I was certain, at least, that the ocean wasn’t the answer.
Read More »by Marija Rakić Mimica (translated by Tanja Radmilo)
Today I’m going to cheat on my husband. I’m going to make love to a man that I’m not allowed to love. I’ll meet the morning after blinded by my act, which I’ll carry with me for a long time; after showering I’ll recognize his smell, that will remind me of us, I’ll carry collected guilt and bitterness as I walk down the street and, finally, I’ll bring them into my apartment with me.
Read More »
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