By ANANDA LIMA
I wait and weigh the odds
of me being who feeds
and feeds and scrolls through
feeds feeding on grey
Translated by MAIA TABET
The Long Winter
“They’re here—” she was about to scream, bolting upright, her heart pounding in her chest. It was as if a snake had brushed against her bare skin under the comforter. He snatched his arms away from where they lay against her neck and her cleavage. They were both naked: beads of sweat quivered on the hairs of his broad chest, and her breasts trembled over the volcano that had erupted in her heart.
Translated by NICHOLAS FRIEDMAN
You want me daybreak,
you want me sea-spray,
you want me pearl-like.
You want me lilywhite
and, above all, chaste—
my perfume faint,
my petals shut tight.
By LUQMAN DERKI
Translated by JONATHAN WRIGHT
A Trip to Ain Diwar
We woke up at five o’clock in the morning and ran to the Hophop bus that was waiting at the school gate. It was colored and beautiful and had the words Scania speaks and the Volvo hurts written on it. The children stood in line in an orderly fashion as they boarded the bus. Teacher was carrying a stick made from a pomegranate branch given to him by the son of a local official, who is lazy but who always comes first in class. Sheikh Khadir, the driver, was washing the bus, and as they boarded, the children splashed the children behind them with water.
Translated by AURORA LAUZARDO UGARTE
The hole is behind the headboard. We opened it some time ago. I couldn’t say exactly when we became aware of the weariness lurking around us, maybe eight years ago. It lasted for hours, sometimes for days. Then it disappeared. During those anxious periods, we didn’t know what to do. It’s a horrible feeling. You can’t stand being with that person any longer. It’s not boredom in the strict sense of the word. Intolerance, perhaps. Everything annoys you. The way they click their tongue, the unexpected smile, the wrong word said at the wrong time, the obsequious caress. Even the things that you thought were funny before seem unbearable now. It may be the cumulative effect, a friend said. A sort of allergy—you stuff yourself on your favorite food until one day your body says: Enough! You break out in red spots, itching and sweating, which only makes it worse. Just like that. Too much of a good thing, I say. One day we looked at each other and we couldn’t take it anymore—I was fed up with him, and he with me—and we searched for a solution.
Translated by RICARDO ALBERTO MALDONADO
“Hunger. It’s like an animal trapped inside you, Thomas thought.” —James Dashner
The flavor of those eyes continued to dance in her mouth as she savored the aftertaste with little smacks of her tongue. Just before dawn, she lifted up her gaze toward the infinite, making out only the light that was deep blue and amber. Everything is relative to day, to night, to colors, and to sustenance. When you are hungry, your steps assume an ashen color as if in a dream of incineration—somber, grayish, full of pain. We’ve all been hungry, we are hunger, yet she was alone. Especially after that early morning when nature exploded into wind and rain, leaving her home battered. That morning, three of her kittens, her only companions, drowned in her basement.
Right before Baby finished ninth grade, Jerry (Baby’s dad) announced that Baby and Carla (Baby’s older sister) would work for him that summer. Baby thought it was a great idea. She would much rather landscape for Jerry than work at one of the three pizza/sub joints in town, or at a basketball camp for kids, which was most of what of her teammates were doing.
Jerry was six-three (two inches taller than Baby) and had a thick mustache and a laugh that rattled fine china. He’d built the house they lived in. In church he sang the loudest and the most out of tune. Six nights a week he did a hundred push-ups. He never took a sick day. It was true what everyone said, that Jerry was the most hardworking, honest man in Waldo County, Maine. The other thing people said was he didn’t suffer fools, but Baby was not one hundred percent sure what this meant, so she couldn’t say if she agreed.
By TOM PAINE
While eating sardines because they swim for a shorter time in the dying oceans than larger fish and are thus less full of mercury and industrial cocktails (and also because they promote neuroplasticity with all their Omega-three fatty acids, and who doesn’t want to grow new neurons?), and while vigorously churning the sardines with a fork in the can so they didn’t look so suited and ready to swim, I spied a lunula of minute vertebrae dangling from my fork.
By LISA CHEN
In Susan Sontag’s short story “Project for a Trip to China,” the unnamed narrator is invited on a junket by the Chinese government. The project unfolds as a loose association of daydreams, epigrams, facts, and memories triggered by the promise of this future trip.
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