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The Slaves

April 30, 2018 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By GHALIB HALASA
Translated by THORAYA EL-RAYYES

At the borderland between the desert and the plains, Emirate of Transjordan, early twentieth century

Two men sat near the round threshing floor in the western fields. Each with his rifle on his lap. “What a goddamn year,” Tafish said. He had a skull-like face. Small, sunken, deep-set eyes. Emaciated cheeks with protruding cheekbones. A broad forehead with dark blue veins at the sides. Skin like an aged tortoise. His hair and lower jaw were hidden behind a white keffiyeh, held in place by a black fleece cord around his head. His frame was tall, straight, lithe. He rubbed his nose with his hand, letting a low whistle out of his nostrils. By the time he lowered his hand, a pensive expression of disgust had formed on his face. Staring straight ahead, he spoke, as if to himself: “What a goddamn year.”

Passages

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Poetry

By TEOW LIM GOH

Ten miles of concrete can bring you
to different places. Your feet carry you
across the ground, let you

January’s Child

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Podcasts & Audio, Poetry

By RANDOLPH THOMAS

When winter set in, they came
to see us with their baby,
a beautiful child about a year old
who was learning to walk
and stepped proudly
across our living room,
waved her fists and hands
and shook her straw colored hair.

After Creation, Before The Fall

April 30, 2018 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By MUFLEH AL-ODWAN

Translated by ALICE GUTHRIE

Adam

As broken as a venial sin,

and as weary as the last to be created (or the first),

he looked to the sky, now become his ground.

Once he’d learned about naming and questioning, and saw what he saw of the blue corridors of space, he asked himself:

I wonder what the Throne is?

Did the Throne of the Almighty exist before water, or arise after water? And what is water, anyway?

Despairing, he smacked the trunk of the tree he was sitting under.

It Happens

April 30, 2018 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By JAMILA AMAIREH
Translated by THORAYA EL-RAYYES

I sit on my old chair, scatter my multicolored toys around me, and start watching evening cartoons on TV. Cool Pancho shoots off through the streets in his car, feeling awesome. He’d bought the car back from the old lady living next door. Never mind that he’d paid too much, more than two thousand pounds. No problem. He slows down, speeds up, and finally stops at the green fields to go for a stroll. The episode ends, but I stay glued to the television, waiting for my truly favorite cartoon: The Adventures of Zaina the Bee. Zaina is a menacing creature; she has no other business but instigating pranks on her friend Nahhul. Nahhul, for his part, has no choice but to come crawling back to his bully-of-a-buddy every time.

Arabs on the Beach in Alexandria

April 30, 2018 Essays, Issue 15, Issue 15 Essays

By NOOR NAGA

It was the summer of 2013, a formidable summer in Egypt. We walked from our villa toward the sea, carrying collapsible aluminum chairs, bags of cucumber-and-cheese sandwiches and pea-sized yellow grapes that are called banaati—literally, “girlish.” This had been our ritual for the past seven Fridays. My grandmother walked ahead with my aunt, and I followed floppily in their morning shadow. We spent every weekend at Qariyet El Muhandiseen, one of many gated compounds that have sprung up in the last four decades, providing summer getaways for the Egyptian elite. Completed in the late eighties, only twenty-six kilometers west of Alexandria, this one in particular is considered démodé.

A Complicated Letter to Sándor Ferenczi

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Poetry

By JESSICA LANAY

It may be cliché to say this now, but how people treat themselves can show you how they treat those closest to them, then other strangers. I often forget to water my flailing herb garden. I often force my body—muscles hard from the lactic acid produced in my anxious panics—to be pleasant to my lovers, who expect pleasantries.

The Bus

April 30, 2018 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By MAHMOUD AL-RIMAWI

Translated by ELISABETH JAQUETTE

Between France and Marrakech is a route upon which travels a single bus from Paris. The bus reaches its destination safely, as one might hope and expect. Then the passengers who so desire transfer to another bus, which takes them by an established road to Agadir.

From Husband Number Four

April 30, 2018 Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA
Translated by NATHANIEL GALLANT

I have enclosed this letter in another sent to Mr. Lama Chobuden¹ of Darjeeling, India, and expect by now it has been forwarded along from him to Japan. While I am not without my concerns as to whether or not you will indeed receive the letter, if by some chance it were not to make the passage, I am given solace only by the fact that you are not in any particular anticipation of a letter. That being said, if you are to receive this letter, I am certain that you will find yourself taking some amusement in my fate. First, I am living in Tibet. Second, I have become a Chinese person. Third, I share a wife with three other husbands.

In New Cities We Run Into No One

April 30, 2018 Issue 15, Issue 15 Poetry, Poetry

By ROSEBUD BEN-ONI

& no one believes the future is horses falling
beneath ten thousand satellites & ten thousand
tombs & who in the new
cities will say through
horses of fire & phosphorous drain
that we could make the journey alone
a temple?