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.
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