Issues | Page 54 | The Common

Baby Was Not Fine

October 29, 2018 Fiction, Issue 16, Issue 16 Fiction, Podcasts & Audio

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.

Bovine

October 29, 2018 Issue 16, Issue 16 Poetry, Poetry

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.

Project for a Trip to China

October 29, 2018 Essays, Issue 16, Issue 16 Essays

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.

Sofa

October 29, 2018 Fiction, Issue 16, Issue 16 Fiction, Translation

By CEZANNE CARDONA MORALES

Translated by CURTIS BAUER

My parents conceived me on a sofa in a department store. My mother worked in the underwear section and was a second-year nursing student. My father worked in the household appliances, hardware, and gardening section, and was a fifth-year social sciences student. They’d hardly been dating a month, and they’d never worked the same shift. Until that morning in May. No one saw them enter the warehouse holding hands—the store wouldn’t open to the public for another hour. No one heard them either, despite the fact that the sofa still had a plastic covering on the cushions to protect it from any stains. The sofa was more cream than yellow; it had solid wood legs and fit three people comfortably. Though my parents didn’t intend it, that morning there were already three of us.

Resurrection

October 29, 2018 Issue 16, Issue 16 Poetry, Poetry

By NATHALIE HANDAL

Why do you keep moving?
Because I’ve been given no other choice.

Why do you keep moving?
Because I don’t have the right passport.

With what do you cross borders?
A notebook, a hat, a picture of Jerusalem
and a poem in Aramaic.

Land Not Theirs

October 29, 2018 Essays, Issue 16, Issue 16 Essays, Podcasts & Audio

By MADISON DAVIS

We are driving through downtown Columbus, away from the Greyhound station. I spent fifteen hours on a bus traveling from New York City to visit for Christmas, a holiday, my mother reminds me, that is not even about Jesus anymore. This is a thought she has reiterated over the years, yet it never prevented her from partaking in the holiday during my lifetime. The absence of a decorative tree and gifts reflected a lack of money, not a rejection of the commodification of religion.

Tonight, the Wind

October 29, 2018 Essays, Issue 16, Issue 16 Essays

By HUGO RÍOS CORDERO

The first empty ring echoed all over the room. Since we had left the island, the phone-bridge had been an effective method to recover some of the sounds that, in their absence, made our exiled evenings emptier. But when they failed to answer, uncertainty and impotence took control. It was still early there. Only the low-pitch whistle of the still-weak wind caressing the tops of the palm trees, that ambiguous premonition that could sway either way. This time it would be real. But not yet.

Offstage, Christ

October 29, 2018 Issue 16, Issue 16 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By KRISTINA FAUST
Winner of the 2018 DISQUIET Prize for Poetry

At the meal with the earnest centurion and the woman full of pain, he wanted to say the lamb was delicious. It surprised him to love it as much as he did the blinking gaze of the newly sighted, but to say so didn’t suit the narrative that was running through his fingers like water.

The bed they’d given him for the lonely night was more than adequate for a man. Besides, he was now nearly sentimental about the roughness of linen and the funk of straw.

The History of Sound

October 29, 2018 Fiction, Issue 16, Issue 16 Fiction

By BEN SHATTUCK

I was seventeen when I met David, back in 1916. Now I don’t very much care to count my age. It’s April 1972 here in Cambridge. White puffballs that must be some sort of seedpod have been floating by the window above my writing desk for days, collecting on the sidewalk like first snow.

Three

October 29, 2018 Fiction, Issue 16, Issue 16 Fiction, Translation

By CHRISTIAN IBARRA

Translated by JENNIFER ACKER

The three of them play cards in the dining room. This is the story. Nothing else. Collectively, they’re almost three hundred years old. They drink juice and laugh. Now one of them turns on a small radio, which plays “Autumn Leaves.”