Fiction

Tramsa, Tromsa, Tramso

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction, Translation

By MÒNICA BATET
Translated by MARIALENA CARR and JULIA SANCHES

Sometimes this is my story, others it’s not. They used to bring it up at home whenever the room fell silent. They’d talk about her, about a city with a strange name, Sokołowsko. They’d talk about that evening.

There are still pages and pages with tracings of her hands sitting in a drawer. Some are just of hands, while others have words written on the palms or along the fingers. Run away, Get out, Air air, Disappear…. Now and then I place my hand in one of the outlines to see if we have this one thing in common. If, maybe, I too will see all those people someday.

Remembrances

October 21, 2024 Catalan Portfolio, Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction, Translation

By ANTÒNIA VICENS
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN

Palma, 1978

One day he came, handed me a little box, and said look, look inside. Oh God, what a husband, I was afraid maybe he was losing it, another day it had been look, open this package, and there were more than half a dozen bras with ruffles. I opened the little box and was practically blinded by a stone brighter than the sun. No explanation, nothing, business is coming along, he said. And at night, here we go, trying for an heir, but that wasn’t coming along at all.

An Index of Earth Words

October 14, 2024 Fiction

By ANNESHA MITHA

Excerpted from Every Other Universe, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.

This planet is mine and I belong to this planet. I know because when the dirt hits my tongue I feel almost joy. The earth here tastes like blood, which I haven’t tasted in many years, but I remember it, I remember being a child and cutting myself on an open can my mother had left in the kitchen, so long ago the memory comes to me as if from underwater. I slid my thumb against the silver crease, and my skin forked and made a dripping. It was my first encounter with sincere pain, but I didn’t mind. I still don’t. It feels like stray teeth in my stomach, a hard, misplaced bite.

The medical team here, of which I am a part, is overstaffed. If there’s a hurt on you, we’ll find it, we’ll lay you horizontal on a clean white sheet and watch the monitors spasm green and black, we’ll dizzy you with painkillers. There’s nothing else for us to do. Pain has become almost absent from our planet. I miss it. I miss stomachaches and headaches, the way my mind would curve toward the small agonies, how the basket of my body carried my hurt everywhere I went. Now, people are dying without any hurt at all, vanishing in clean rooms that smell like lemons.

not equal to ≄

October 14, 2024 Fiction

By AYOTOLA TEHINGBOLA

Story selected from Lagos Will Be Hard for You, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.

There was a statue of the real Jack Daniels in the corner, or so the plaque read, but Jonathan swore that it looked more like one of the U.S. presidents: hat, beard, suit, presence, pose. It had a rainbow flag affixed to its shoulder, so Lotanna, or Lottie as she had come to be called in America, went with the Jack Daniels claim.

It was New Year’s Eve and they were on their third date. 10th Street Station was a basement bar and Lotanna decided she liked it as soon as she stepped in. The walls boasted of old autographed Hollywood posters and portraits, number plates proud of the Land of Potatoes, and when Lotanna found drawings on one of the high beams she thought it must have been by someone who cared a lot about this place but was shy of their talent. It was all mismatched in shape, color, and size. Nothing belonged. Like her. They ordered glasses of IPA and sat near the heater, and she kept glancing at her phone, waiting for the new year to ring so she could go home to her basement apartment.

“Hey. You okay?” Jonathan asked, nudging her lightly.

Three Stories from A Bunch of Savages

October 14, 2024 Fiction

By SOFI STAMBO

Excerpted from A Bunch of Savages, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.

Baba Borka

I absolutely have to go to Coney Island every weekend. People think that’s strange. Luckily, lately I don’t care if people love me, like I did before. I used to suffer and blush and stay home and cry. Not anymore—I grew up and out of this. One day I woke up and realized that it doesn’t matter if I am well-liked or not. What matters is to get up at six, go to work, calculate for fifty hours, get yelled at, watch people get bullied, stay calm, and not kill anyone.

I can definitely do this, but with huge quantities of Coney Island.

I need to step into this postcard image of sea, sand, salt, and seagulls. This is my comfort zone. I don’t need anything else. Unless we are going for perfect, then maybe a peeled peach, and my grandmother to peel it.

Summer always starts with her glittering, gold-toothed smile. In the morning, the night train from the capital arrives at the old station in Varna. My small grandmother and huge grandfather are running toward us, they always ran, with bouquets for my mother, my sister, and me. These dahlias have been planted, watered, and weeded months ago for us. They’d been cut an hour before. The seagulls scream, it smells like sea, the station shines wet from the fog and bright from the sun and the smiles of my people.

Excerpt from Cattail

October 14, 2024 Fiction

By HAITAO XU

Excerpted from Cattail, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2024.

Kargh, pzzzs, kargh. Good morning, Revolutionary comrades! The sun is rising;
Kargh, pzzsz . . . the war drum is beating!

Again, the formidable metal rooster atop the office building of Sunrise People’s Commune Brigade Three shattered the quiet early morning with its violent static coughs and squawks.

Hearing it, Cattail, a tall and thin girl in a faded purple winter coat, kicked the dirt floor of the kitchen, a lean-to attached to their main dwelling, which consisted of a hut with two bedrooms and a common area.

She should have the breakfast ready. But their meal, sweet potato soup, the same food they have twice a day in winter, was not boiling yet. The sweet potatoes were like stones. She knew the loudspeaker would soon summon every commune member, all the adult residents of Brigade Three, to report to work.

Day Hike

October 8, 2024 Fiction

By AMY STUBER

Alice wants to walk on the trail, but Renee wants to wander. At least that’s what I imagine.

Maybe Alice tells Renee, “It takes two hours to get to the lake. Let’s keep moving,” and probably Renee heads down offshoot paths to get closer to the falls. In the first half-hour, on their way to the lake at the peak, they see a fox, a mother and baby moose, and three animatronic-looking deer.

Paper Summer

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Fiction

By YUNHAN FANG

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

By the summer of 2009, I found I was thinking less and less about the Wenchuan earthquake the year prior, in which 87,000 people had died, my father among them. That year, on the day of Xiazhi, I met a girl called Thirteen. We spent the night together, having sex and talking until the sky turned the color of moonstone.

My Five-Thousand-Meter Years

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Fiction

BY K-YU LIU

This piece is part of a special portfolio featuring new and queer voices from China. Read more from the portfolio here.

The rumor was there was a backdoor into the best running camp in the capital. To get your kid in, there’d better be something wrong with their mind.

Mother drove me to the facility with a note from Dr. Chen in her purse. For four hours, roads splintered and strayed under our wheels. Eventually we arrived at the far Northeast corner: cornfields and silent cranes, tired grey apartments, willow trees bowing their listless branches.

The American Scholar

September 30, 2024 China Portfolio, Fiction

By JIANAN QIAN

This piece is part of a special portfolio about youth and contemporary culture in China. Read more from the portfolio here.

Alex dislikes the security check in Shanghai’s subway stations, from both an ideological and personal perspective. Being American, he hates any intrusion on privacy. And today he’s carrying a black dildo in his backpack, wrapped in a wine tote bag with a Spanish brand name on the outside. Still, he worries the X-ray man might stop him for inspection.

He touches the student ID in his jeans pocket. Back in college, George—his Chinese teacher whose toupee once came loose—had told him that the Chinese respect Ph.D. students.

The man lets him pass.

“Xie xie,” Alex thanks him.

It’s not rush hour. He finds a seat and places his backpack on his lap. With his uncombable hair sprawling out in all directions, he looks like the photo of Einstein that appears in Chinese high school textbooks. Not that Alex would know about that. His destination is the west side of the city, a five-star hotel. A sex class will take place in one of the suites and he’ll be one of the models. It’s his first time participating in the sex industry, and the thought brings a smile to his face. However, the young woman sitting beside him seems uncomfortable or offended by his presence, and moves to another seat.