By JAMES K. BOYCE
With photos by TIANNE STROMBECK
Sitting on a boulder one morning on a little island in northwestern Ontario, I watched a loon fishing about fifty yards offshore. The air and water were dead calm, the lake surface mirroring the clouds above and the trees along the shoreline.
For Ana María Alonso
It was late October, and my half-sister, Nikki, and I walked arm in arm with our stepmother through the streets of Caracas. The sweet metallic smell of gasoline, ever-present in the city, mixed with the acrid sourness of tropical flowers decaying at the end of the rainy season to create a pungent indolic scent. The sun had set behind Mount Ávila while we were at the party, so we walked under the glow of streetlights toward our car parked a few blocks away. Even though Nikki and I hadn’t anticipated needing nice clothes for this visit, we’d each thrown a dress into our suitcase at the last minute. The special occasion turned out to be our step-cousin’s son’s second birthday. The click of our high heels echoed through empty streets. Armed robberies, carjackings, gang activity, and police shoot-outs had contributed to a climate of fear and insecurity amongst residents, who no longer went out after dark unless necessary. But our stepmother, Inger, never bothered with such warnings—she entrusted her life (and ours) to fate.
It was March 2023, and I was alone in Wellington. The creative writing class I’d traveled there to teach had ended. Antipodean summer was ending too, night falling earlier, rain dripping from the lemonwood trees, the gray surface of the harbor whipped and wrinkled by a wind that roared ceaselessly through the Cook Strait.
By RIMA BRUSI
Translated from the Spanish by JESSICA POWELL
Excerpted from Phantoms
In January 1970, two months before my conception, John Lennon and Yoko Ono shaved their heads, and a few weeks later they released the single “Instant Karma!”
If this thing I’m writing were a script, my parents’ acid-filled days on New York’s Lower East Side would be accompanied by this song. This is what I’m thinking about today as I talk to my mother, Teté, on the phone. This is mainly how we communicate: in-person visits rarely go well for us. In fact, our life together has always been more or less a disaster. We maintain our relationship, what remains of it, with the help of the telephone and letters.
When Hannibal was loose in Italy and could not be made to leave, the Romans did a strange thing. They consulted their books of prophecy, and the books told them to go get a mother.
In the middle of the Mediterranean, 50 miles from Sicily, 200 miles from Libya, floats a country whose general character has been defined by centuries of accretion and erasure.
This is the island that played host to this spring’s newest reality dating show, Love Overboard, in which sixteen sculpted young people battle for connection and status on a luxury yacht. The yacht, and the people, mostly float off the coast, though the golden sandstone of capital city Valletta looms behind them. The guiding myth of such shows is that a beautiful locale—sunny, cloistered, preferably bare of culture—is conducive to love.
The reality of Malta is that it’s the loneliest place I’ve been.
On this arid soil—not a river to be found on the entire island—forces as mythic as Ottomans and Knights Hospitaller met to make their case for dominion; Byzantines came, Arabs, the French. The resulting language, born of this crossroads aesthetic, seems to blend the insistence of Italian and the lilt of Arabic, though most islanders also speak English, which feels—like the red telephone boxes dotting the capital—vestigial.
Excerpted from the essay collection FREEDOM.
I arrive in Johannesburg, South Africa, on December 2, 2013. My father will join me in two weeks, with my brother to follow a week later. In one month, we will unveil my mother’s headstone in the township where she grew up, one year after her death. Weeks before my arrival, a report detailing unlawful expenditure of taxpayer money in the form of $20 million of “security improvements” to President Jacob Zuma’s lavish compound, is leaked to the press. Nine years ago, the country’s first all-race elections were held and South Africa finally regained freedom from apartheid rule.
A story is an offering—
something with a bright, burstable skin and tender flesh.
Whenever my mother gives me one of her stories, I watch her cut into it, lay it out for me in a way I can consume, in a way she can bear.
By RO SKELTON
The first apartment that I lived in in Dakar was brand new and backed onto the far end of the airport runway, so that from my bedroom window I had a distant view of the ocean and of a vast baobab tree silhouetted against the hazy Saharan sky. The neighborhood––modest two-story family homes and the occasional new building like mine––was as far out of town as taxis would go, and even then they would refuse to take me the whole way, grumbling as they dropped me at the entrance to the neighborhood, so that I had to walk the rest of the way to my apartment along a potholed, sandy road.
By EMILY NEMENS
She was running along the Manhattan side of the East River—this was in the bucolic “before” times, prior to when the city tore up the East Village’s riverside park, chucking its eighty-year-old trees and modernist amphitheater and ebullient perennial flower beds in the name of future flood mitigation—when she felt a curtain being snapped up the back of her left calf, krrrrrik! More lightning than pain. At first. Then, it became very painful. A hot pain that ran an invisible line down the meat of her calf, like those sexy stockings with seams, but the seams had turned carnivorous and were nibbling at her flesh with tiny razor teeth. Running farther, even slow-jogging the 1.3 miles home, was out of the question (her mental math: more pain multiplied by less time in transit, or less pain times more minutes; the latter had the lower sum), so she slowly limped back from the river, putting as little weight on her left foot as possible. She wondered what she would do.
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