Fiction

Inês

April 9, 2025 Fiction

I really don’t want to be that guy but this doesn’t make any sense. I mean, maybe it does, you tell me. I don’t know you, we never went, let’s say, to Varadero together. Us with straw hats, drinking cocktails by the sea with salt on the rim of the glass, Buena Vista Social Club playing on the speakers, me doing crosswords and you playing sudoku, me to you, Stimulate with seven letters, us playing beach tennis (nowadays you guys are so posh, playing padel every Saturday morning with another couple, I’m always making fun of you because of that, you jerks), us getting to the airport, me walking so clumsily, because I’m always in a hurry, because I didn’t want to bother that nice lady holding a kid in her arms that was in front of me in the security line and now I got behind. I pick up my things, oh so gracelessly, I hold my backpack by one of its wings and start walking while I try to put on my belt, so that now I look like Quasimodo, if Quasimodo was a pervert, almost running because it’s time to go and ring that bell, with his pants falling down. You guys laugh at me, you say something I can’t quite understand, but I don’t get offended because, after all, we’re friends and that’s what friends do. I realize now that we are perfectly on time. I always am, we still have half an hour before boarding. So, you go get some chocolates for the flight while I go look at the books and CDs. I have a weird fascination with ugly covers and gas-station CDs. If we’re going to Varadero together, I think you should know that. Us going to a Cohen gig. Us drinking a pint at some bar in Alvalade. You guys to me, João. Me, Yes. You guys, It’s my father. I start to get emotional (I get emotional so easily), trying not to cry, because you’re not crying, even before realizing if what happened to your father was serious or not. I always liked your father very much.

Bungalow Boogie Countdown

March 12, 2025 Fiction

By REBECCA BAUMANN

A watercolor illustration of a Spanish-style, white-stucco bungalow. The house is short, with an almost flat roof and symmetrical windows on the facade. It is framed by bright green landscaping in the front, and, behind, by palm fronds.

“untitled,” watercolor, by Cuyler McDonald. Image courtesy of author.

Ten

We claw-dance between the folding walls.

“Are we sinking?” I ask.

Our backs flatten into herringbone patterns against the floorboards. Oil from our noses stains the adobe ceiling.

“We’re doing the boogie!” he says.

He waggles a finger that can no longer stretch up. I laugh-cry. I listen to the house moan. “Do you hear me creaking?”

My ribcage smushes into a desert plateau.

“It’s not us. It’s only the wooden boards, I’m sure,” he says.

The Hare

March 6, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By ISMAEL RAMOS
Translated by JACOB ROGERS
Piece appears below in English and the original Galician.

Translator’s Note
Translating “The Hare,” by Ismael Ramos, was a perfect encapsulation of the idea that the hardest texts to translate are not necessarily the most maximalist or technical, but the sparest and most pared down. In his narration, Ramos keeps things moving at a brisk pace with gentle, light-footed prose dotted with sparks of lyricism. His dialogue is similarly effective, with sharp, often curt interchanges between the siblings Raúl and Valeria that maintain a tension that thrums under the surface of their car ride. And therein lies the challenge: if it were only a matter of reproducing sentences as lovely as these, that would be one thing; the hard part is that they need to be both lovely and charged with the electrical undercurrent of the unspoken, they need to lean on a word or intention in some places and lay off in others, just as brother and sister push and pull at each other. Or, as Raúl might put it, they metaphorical ping pong, deflecting and attacking and dissimulating.

Excerpt from The Undercurrent

February 20, 2025 Fiction

By SARAH SAWYER

This piece is excerpted from The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer ’97, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10^th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.

Austin, Texas
1987

A girl leans on a metal guardrail at the edge of a brown field. She will not stand here again. She knows this, so she is trying to notice everything: the tall stalks of grass turning into thick stitches of coral and gold, the sun a dark orange marble rolling past the clouds. When she looks down, she sees her toes curling in the gravel, the dents from the hot guardrail burning the soft undersides of her forearms.

If she stays here, facing the field, she can’t see the bulldozers, perched like yellow vultures in the cul-de-sac behind her.

Postscript

February 4, 2025 Fiction

By KOMAL DHRUV

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge is one of the most beloved Bollywood films of all time. The movie has been playing in theatres since its release in 1995, with Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theater giving it an uninterrupted 25 year run as of 2020. The film follows the love story of happy-go-lucky Raj and dutiful Simran, two NRI’s¹ who grew up in London with their immigrant parents. Raj and Simran meet on vacation while touring Europe, only to realize their love story must be cut short: when Simran returns home, her family plans to move back to Punjab to fulfill her arranged marriage to Ajit, the son of her father’s old friend. Raj, with the encouragement of his wealthy and supportive father, travels to India to win Simran’s family’s blessings before the wedding. After a dramatic fight at the local train station between Raj and Ajit, Simran’s father recognizes the love between Raj and Simran and releases his daughter, telling her to go conquer her own life. Simran runs across the platform in a golden dress, trying to catch Raj’s hand and make it on the train as it pulls out of the station.

While the credits roll, Raj and Simran take the train to Amritsar International Airport. No one flinches at his bloodied face–they’ve all seen stranger things on these commutes. The couple returns to London, buys a flat with their parents’ money, sets up house. Raj must find a job, and, given his qualifications, he takes one in his father’s company. Simran’s family returns too, after a few months’ vacation; enough time to allow her father to say goodbye to Punjab and to mourn the separation. Simran’s younger sister Chutki thanks God in her prayers every night.

The Valkyrie

January 14, 2025 Fiction

By ELIZABETH BROGDEN

Anyone, glancing up momentarily from their smørrebrød platters or seasonal mead cocktails, could be forgiven for assuming that the couple cradled together in the bay window is newlywed. Something about the tip of their heads, the rhyme of their postures, their profiles ambered in the resinous twilight.

Translation: Side Entrance to the House

December 5, 2024 Fiction, Translation

By AMAL AL SAEEDI
Translated from the Arabic by NASHWA NASRELDIN

Piece appears below in English. To view the original Arabic, please click here.

Translator’s note:

Amal al Saeedi’s Side Entrance to the House immediately caught my attention. For one, literature that centers the house intrigues me; perhaps it’s the innate mystery held within the brick walls that surrounds us, the way it enfolds us, inhabiting us as much as we inhabit it. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, The House with Only an Attic and a Cellar, by Kathryn Maris, Laura Scott’s So Many Rooms, Eman Abderahim’s Rooms and Other Stories, have all lured me in by the title first.

The Con Artist

December 3, 2024 Fiction

By GLENN BERTRAM

In April, Simon went down to Murray Park to eat hamburgers with the Methodists. It was his monthly tradition. The Methodists’ burgers were charred and rubbery, but the Methodists themselves made ideal marks. They were upstanding citizens with steady jobs at regional banks and local power stations. They’d known neither poverty nor wealth. And they weren’t teetotalers like the Baptists, so you could ply them with craft beer and get them yapping about golf and gambling and everything their marriages lacked. They assumed good faith in the people around them. Simon loved the Methodists. Despite his taste, he chose to find them charming: a matter of professional habit. It was Leonard who’d showed him the way. You had to love your marks.

The Shirt

November 18, 2024 Fiction

By DAVID RYAN

Jonathan finds the shirt on the closeout rack at a trendy vintage shop in Provincetown. He’s never heard of the maker, the satin tag embroidered in the neck as if by hand, it looks British, probably twenty, thirty years old, this short sleeve—the cloth heavier than cloth, at least the cloth of shirts he might normally afford. The muted blue-green-grey rayon shimmers, the smallest blues and greens houndsteeth fused into a strange harmony within the gray and fine-lined black blocking. Its gentle plaids inferentially iridescent. And this, like an aura hovers about the shirt, its inferred past, as if the weave of fibers are quietly singing an elegy, an amassing of light. He fingers the cloth, imagines the fingers of a millworker feeding the cord into a sewing machine, shuddering wooden bobbins in some industrial town. And then he tries it on.

It’s his favorite shirt for a couple of years. One night, he wears it over a white, long-sleeved henley to a club where a friend of a friend knows the singer in the band playing. Jonathan and his friend get backstage. For reasons later forgotten—perhaps in a fit of generosity produced by the free bourbon in the dressing room, he lets the drummer, who’d commented on how beautiful the shirt was, wear it on stage. Jonathan and his friend return to the audience for the show. There his shirt appears, on stage, shimmering under the lights, and the moment of its glory, strangely perhaps, feels as if belonging to Jonathan.

Silk Road

November 7, 2024 Fiction, Translation

By NIEVES GARCÍA BENITO
Translated by CARMELA FERRADÁNS

Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note

“Silk Road” is one of twelve short stories in Nieves García Benito’s collection By Way of Tarifa (Por la vía de Tarifa), originally published in 1999.

Forced migration and human trafficking are two of the most pressing humanitarian issues in the world today. In the Mediterranean alone, thousands of people travel across the Straits of Gibraltar every year on their way to Europe, but only a few arrive at their final destinations in France and Germany. Many are stuck working in the fields of Murcia, Spain. Many more drown around the waters of Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe, a mere nine miles from the coasts of Morocco. This is the location where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, where Africa and Europe are the closest and at the same time the farthest away for so many people. Nieves García Benito’s stories give voice to these children, men, and women who leave their homes in Africa hoping for a better life, a safer life in Europe.