RICHARD GWYN
Leaving behind the clamor of Mexico City, I catch a bus and cross the wide altiplano. Behind the tinted windows are strewn the blackened remains of trees and cactus, upon which perch large, dark birds. Half asleep on the silent bus, which plows like an ocean liner across the prairie.

NATASHA BURGE
An editor suggests I write about being an alien. This word I like, with its superabundance of meaning. It reminds me of visa stamps crowding an already full passport, of space shuttles and star dust and loneliness. It rings true.

OLIVE AMDUR
There were tomato plants on the windowsill of the loft where I slept, and at night, when all the lights were out, I could see stars through the screened glass. We stayed only a few days, for momentary distance from the city, heavy with humidity and grief.

MARTHA COOLEY
At any rate, although neither of us was skittish about talking, we couldn’t seem to find common verbal ground, and our conversations had grown increasingly fraught. My husband wanted a kid; I wanted to want one, which wasn’t the same thing.

RAVI SHANKAR
Tomorrow is Amma’s seventieth birthday, and I’m wondering what to buy her. She’s told me that the only thing she wants from her children is a new toilet seat, a pair of sensible black shoes, or a replacement floormat for her decade-old Honda Civic.

A. NATASHA JOUKOVSKY
There is something post-decadent about Versailles in winter. The fountains are off; there are not many tourists. Everything is still fiercely geometric and over-the-top, but in this gray, expired kind of way, at least most of the day; the crisp chill of nighttime being an exception.

JINJIN XU
Five times a day, there are knocks on my door and I have to open. I am learning to distinguish between the frantic banging of the hazmat-suited man taking my temperature, and the rushed taps of the man delivering plastic cartons of hot food. On my third day, two medics knocked…

CASEY WALKER
Couples filled the Café Suíça, no longer the solitary men of before the war. From the rack of newspapers, they never chose the copies of O Século. They spoke anything but Portuguese. French and English. German. Slavic languages he could barely identify.

OONA PATRICK
The Alentejo is the landscape of heartbreak. Or at least it was to me. Even its trees are clearly loners, set apart from each other at distant intervals across miles of sere brown fields. The Alentejo is all about waiting, with its numbered cork trees, their skinned underbellies…

HÉLIO PÓLVORA
The man gazes at the slope climbing to Olivença square. He doesn’t need to go up there to know that the small, circular plaza, carpeted with grass, has a large cross and a white church—and that from there, as far as the eye can see, the coast, bordered with coconut palms, lies shimmering in the distance.