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by Gregory Spatz
HE WOULD NOT BE the first traveler to imagine his path through the mountains, rising and falling with the course of the river below, as a tunnel cut through space and time with everything along its course fated for him to encounter: the pattern of light and shadow on his windshield and on the road ahead, the exact smattering of rain at kilometer marker 146, wind gusting at the sides of his car, the sudden splat of a dead bug leaving Cranbrook…
Read moreby Salar Abdoh
AT THE END OF A STORY he wrote about the greatest medieval commentator of Aristotle, Borges noted: The instant I stop believing in him, Averroes disappears.
Read moreby Marc Palmieri
I’D KNOWN FOR weeks that my father had gotten transferred to Long Island. We’d be moving in the winter after Christmas, and I’d be leaving my sixth grade class right in the middle of the year, but I kept it top secret at school, even from my friends. I hadn’t even broken the news to my teacher, Ms. Waters. Whenever it felt like the right time came each day, I put it off and tried to not think about it.
Read moreby Katie Edkins Milligan
IN THAT VERGING summer between high school and college, I worked at a BYOB lobster restaurant on an inland creek in Kittery, half an hour down from Kennebunk by the Post Road, where the water was brown and shallow enough to get hot. I lived in the next county over, which is enemy territory in a football town like this, so I shouldn’t have gotten the job.
Read moreby Heather E. Goodman
LAUREL RACED FROM the woods, thinking Boone might have doubled back to the house after he bolted. It was hot, too muggy for early June, and she was out of breath after hustling up from the creek that bordered their seven acres. She yelled for Sam, who still called for Boone in the woods behind her. A truck in the driveway: engine wheezing quiet. She saw the shotgun. Stopped. Her voice in her throat, she listened. She could hear Sam’s feet in the leaves, maybe 150 yards off.
Read moreby Kalisha Buckhanon
ONE HUNDRED AND Forty-Seventh Street was packed with many buildings like the five-story walk-up I looked for. Their units waited on new parquet floors, faux marble kitchen backsplashes, and doubled rents once the long-term tenants were evicted or dead.
Read moreby Lawrence Osborne
CASSIDY SARAH O'BRIAN was past thirty-eight and already divorced when she decided to write her thesis on the language of the Outer Citak. They were a remote people of the Maukele forests closely related to the Inner Citak and, more remotely, with the Korowai. She had studied them for some years, aware that they represented to the linguist a niche of underrepresented possibilities. They were Neolithic horticulturalists and no one knew whether they had a past imperfect tense in their language. They might be useful when it came time to post her mark on posterity.
Read moreby Luis Amate Perez
SHE COULD HAVE been a boy. Her chest looked stripped of the fat and muscle that make breasts possible. Although this was the first time I'd seen her topless, I felt as though I'd seen her bones somewhere before, in the mirror over my bathroom sink after a bath—the chest of a bony nine year old boy—a reflection.
Read moreby Julio Cortázar
IN THE AUTUMN of 1978, the basic idea of the expedition had been established, with the following rules of the game:
1. Complete the journey from Paris to Marseilles without once leaving the autoroute.
2. Explore each one of the rest areas, at the rate of two per day, spending the night in the second one without exception.
by Patricia Schultheis
WE CLEANED FOR our mothers. Off boats and kerchiefed, they stood at conveyor belts, boxing brassieres or culling cartridges, their hands growing cramped, their ankles swollen, until, shift over, they scarcely could climb onto buses and ride to third-floor flats whose mean little rooms we, their daughters, had cleaned.
Read moreBy Silvina Ocampo
HER NAME WAS Coral Fernández; she always wore her hair over her left ear, leaving the right one uncovered. She was so pretty that at first I thought she was foolish.
We met at a country luncheon to celebrate the opening of the Cyclist's Club in Moreno. The tables were set beneath a grove of blossoming paradise trees; there was a bandstand and a floor for dancing.
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