Dispatches

Lviv, Ukraine

May 10, 2017 Dispatches

A marshrutka is kind of a bus but mostly a van, and at full capacity it can carry 10 people from Brody to Lviv. There were 20 passengers in the marshrutka that day. Garrard looked at me and got a thin paperback novel out of his satchel. “It will be at least two hours on this shrutskie today for sure,” he said. He stood hunched over the van’s middle seat and then asked if I wanted some pills.

Garrard is a friend who will stand for two hours so that I can sit. Ours is an intimate friendship wherein I can blindly trust the handful of mystery pills soaked in his palm sweat he gives me. I swallowed the damp pills, a metallic taste lingering on my tongue.

Data Recovery

April 26, 2017 Dispatches

By KARTHIK PURUSHOTHAMAN

The US of A finally stamped its visa in my black pocketbook. Jazz fusion played in my ear, songs from an album fittingly titled This Meets That. I floated out of the document collection center in Nehru Place, New Delhi.

What Hanife Knows

April 12, 2017 Dispatches

By STEPHEN LYONS

One morning we hike a few miles to a nomad’s camp on an isolated island off Turkey’s southern coast. The hike is uphill, hot, and arduous. We pass the ruins of a Roman cistern and a dry-land tortoise headed downhill. After an hour the path levels out into a broad valley and we arrive. Only the woman is home. Her name is Hanife.

The Chemical Company

March 29, 2017 Dispatches

By MARIA TERRONE

Long Island City, Queens, New York, US

Even if the day was sunny, the air would seem to darken the longer we drove and the farther we bore into the industrial zone. The red brick factories built early in the 20^th century were still holding on then, producing staples, electrical circuits, distributor caps and who knows what else. Yet I recall no workers on the streets. There were no stores, no streets, no sidewalks, just ruts. It’s as if the factories were run by ghosts and the only evidence of life was an occasional wisp of smoke rising into gray haze.

Bubbles

March 15, 2017 Dispatches

By NAILA MOREIRA

When I was a kid, some of the other ten year olds on the bus taught me how to blow spit bubbles. You catch a loop of air against your bottom lip on the tip of your tongue, then roll up your tongue to blow the bubble off into the air. We had great fun wafting these dime-sized spheres over the bus seats. The bus driver wasn’t so amused. She yelled at us, then reported us to the school for “spitting on the bus.” When I got home, my mother–who was still a stay-at-home mom then, though she started working not long after–gave me a good scolding.

The Pennies of Corsicana

February 28, 2017 Dispatches

By SUSAN HARLAN

CORSICANA BRICK CO. So say the bricks, cut within an inch of their lives, and the wet leaves like beetles’ wings, caught in the cobbles. We are the bricks’ leaves, they say, under my feet.

The color of the leaves is the color of the rusty railroad spikes that I gathered in the rain. Illegally, it would seem. Property of the train company, I’m told – possessed by others.

Night So, Safe Home

February 15, 2017 Dispatches

By: KATHLEEN CHURCHILL

Outside the window I could hear men calling out to one another, stumbling up the street. Night, so! Safe home! Someone started singing. Then the baby stirred and the living room door clicked shut again. This time my husband heard it too. He got up, switched on the lights, checked that the apartment was locked (it was), and then turned off the lights and came back to bed. Soon he was fast asleep.

Between Stations in a Chicago Train Car, I Think of Home

February 1, 2017 Dispatches

By GRADY CHAMBERS

Tonight the boys swaying in the northbound train car

wear old-logo Bulls hats and France IV

stitched into their puffy jackets—

View with a Grain of Salt

January 18, 2017 Dispatches

By CHRIS WIEWIORA

Underground, you expected a loamy smell. Instead you inhale a dry, metallic breeze. The English-speaking Polish guide tells your tour group that the mine’s temperature holds at 57ºF despite the 80º May day above in Krakow. You zip up your jacket before you descend the stairs cut out of salt.

Not Gary, Indiana: 2016

January 4, 2017 Dispatches

By KELLI ALLEN

Some road trips are propelled by an arrow of indifference. We look for the keys on their ring, nestled often in a bag of felid mice. If my open sweater signifies carry, tail and tuft and brass also mean rest.

When we drove past the circus hand’s kitchen, open in way of Southern Indiana late summers, we smelled peaches burning on the rough iron stove. I remembered when you told me that every day is a sliding between an expectation and an opening. It was easy to hand-over every coin in my purse and burn both our tongues with pit fruits and cheap bourbon.

Lviv, Ukraine

Data Recovery

What Hanife Knows

The Chemical Company

Bubbles

The Pennies of Corsicana

Night So, Safe Home

Between Stations in a Chicago Train Car, I Think of Home

View with a Grain of Salt

Not Gary, Indiana: 2016

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