Fiction | The Common

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Excerpt from The Undercurrent

February 20, 2025 Fiction

This piece is excerpted from The Undercurrent by Sarah Sawyer ’97, a guest at Amherst College’s LitFest 2025. Register for this exciting, 10^th-anniversary celebration of Amherst’s literary legacy and life.

Austin, Texas
1987

A girl leans on a metal guardrail at the edge of a brown field. She will not stand here again. She knows this, so she is trying to notice everything: the tall stalks of grass turning into thick stitches of coral and gold, the sun a dark orange marble rolling past the clouds. When she looks down, she sees her toes curling in the gravel, the dents from the hot guardrail burning the soft undersides of her forearms.

If she stays here, facing the field, she can’t see the bulldozers, perched like yellow vultures in the cul-de-sac behind her.

Postscript

February 4, 2025 Fiction

By KOMAL DHRUV

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge is one of the most beloved Bollywood films of all time. The movie has been playing in theatres since its release in 1995, with Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir theater giving it an uninterrupted 25 year run as of 2020. The film follows the love story of happy-go-lucky Raj and dutiful Simran, two NRI’s¹ who grew up in London with their immigrant parents. Raj and Simran meet on vacation while touring Europe, only to realize their love story must be cut short: when Simran returns home, her family plans to move back to Punjab to fulfill her arranged marriage to Ajit, the son of her father’s old friend. Raj, with the encouragement of his wealthy and supportive father, travels to India to win Simran’s family’s blessings before the wedding. After a dramatic fight at the local train station between Raj and Ajit, Simran’s father recognizes the love between Raj and Simran and releases his daughter, telling her to go conquer her own life. Simran runs across the platform in a golden dress, trying to catch Raj’s hand and make it on the train as it pulls out of the station.

While the credits roll, Raj and Simran take the train to Amritsar International Airport. No one flinches at his bloodied face–they’ve all seen stranger things on these commutes. The couple returns to London, buys a flat with their parents’ money, sets up house. Raj must find a job, and, given his qualifications, he takes one in his father’s company. Simran’s family returns too, after a few months’ vacation; enough time to allow her father to say goodbye to Punjab and to mourn the separation. Simran’s younger sister Chutki thanks God in her prayers every night.

The Valkyrie

January 14, 2025 Fiction

By ELIZABETH BROGDEN

Anyone, glancing up momentarily from their smørrebrød platters or seasonal mead cocktails, could be forgiven for assuming that the couple cradled together in the bay window is newlywed. Something about the tip of their heads, the rhyme of their postures, their profiles ambered in the resinous twilight.

Translation: Side Entrance to the House

December 5, 2024 Fiction, Translation

By AMAL AL SAEEDI
Translated from the Arabic by NASHWA NASRELDIN

Piece appears below in English. To view the original Arabic, please click here.

Translator’s note:

Amal al Saeedi’s Side Entrance to the House immediately caught my attention. For one, literature that centers the house intrigues me; perhaps it’s the innate mystery held within the brick walls that surrounds us, the way it enfolds us, inhabiting us as much as we inhabit it. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, The House with Only an Attic and a Cellar, by Kathryn Maris, Laura Scott’s So Many Rooms, Eman Abderahim’s Rooms and Other Stories, have all lured me in by the title first.

The Con Artist

December 3, 2024 Fiction

By GLENN BERTRAM

In April, Simon went down to Murray Park to eat hamburgers with the Methodists. It was his monthly tradition. The Methodists’ burgers were charred and rubbery, but the Methodists themselves made ideal marks. They were upstanding citizens with steady jobs at regional banks and local power stations. They’d known neither poverty nor wealth. And they weren’t teetotalers like the Baptists, so you could ply them with craft beer and get them yapping about golf and gambling and everything their marriages lacked. They assumed good faith in the people around them. Simon loved the Methodists. Despite his taste, he chose to find them charming: a matter of professional habit. It was Leonard who’d showed him the way. You had to love your marks.

The Shirt

November 18, 2024 Fiction

By DAVID RYAN

Jonathan finds the shirt on the closeout rack at a trendy vintage shop in Provincetown. He’s never heard of the maker, the satin tag embroidered in the neck as if by hand, it looks British, probably twenty, thirty years old, this short sleeve—the cloth heavier than cloth, at least the cloth of shirts he might normally afford. The muted blue-green-grey rayon shimmers, the smallest blues and greens houndsteeth fused into a strange harmony within the gray and fine-lined black blocking. Its gentle plaids inferentially iridescent. And this, like an aura hovers about the shirt, its inferred past, as if the weave of fibers are quietly singing an elegy, an amassing of light. He fingers the cloth, imagines the fingers of a millworker feeding the cord into a sewing machine, shuddering wooden bobbins in some industrial town. And then he tries it on.

It’s his favorite shirt for a couple of years. One night, he wears it over a white, long-sleeved henley to a club where a friend of a friend knows the singer in the band playing. Jonathan and his friend get backstage. For reasons later forgotten—perhaps in a fit of generosity produced by the free bourbon in the dressing room, he lets the drummer, who’d commented on how beautiful the shirt was, wear it on stage. Jonathan and his friend return to the audience for the show. There his shirt appears, on stage, shimmering under the lights, and the moment of its glory, strangely perhaps, feels as if belonging to Jonathan.

Silk Road

November 7, 2024 Fiction, Translation

By NIEVES GARCÍA BENITO
Translated by CARMELA FERRADÁNS

Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note

“Silk Road” is one of twelve short stories in Nieves García Benito’s collection By Way of Tarifa (Por la vía de Tarifa), originally published in 1999.

Forced migration and human trafficking are two of the most pressing humanitarian issues in the world today. In the Mediterranean alone, thousands of people travel across the Straits of Gibraltar every year on their way to Europe, but only a few arrive at their final destinations in France and Germany. Many are stuck working in the fields of Murcia, Spain. Many more drown around the waters of Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe, a mere nine miles from the coasts of Morocco. This is the location where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, where Africa and Europe are the closest and at the same time the farthest away for so many people. Nieves García Benito’s stories give voice to these children, men, and women who leave their homes in Africa hoping for a better life, a safer life in Europe.

Little Women

October 21, 2024 Fiction, Issue 28, Issue 28 Fiction

By MEGAN TENNANT

In December, one of those nothing afternoons after Christmas, my younger sister Ruth returns to the holiday house, where I am bored with extended family on the stoep. The guests get up, ready to greet them, while my dad finds chairs for her and David. But she pauses with a funny look on her face, as if she’s remembered a dream or eaten something sweet, and says she’s engaged. Now everyone rises, and I make my own lips follow in a smile. David is bashful behind her, accepting hugs and handshakes. I’d like to ask him why he didn’t tell me he was going to propose, ask my parents if they knew. Of course they knew.

There’s Still Oxygen

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

By CARLOTA GURT
Translated by ADRIAN NATHAN WEST

The three of you get into the car. The girls buckle their seatbelts. You turn the key. The spark plug ignites the fuel in the combustion chamber. You depart. It is only thanks to fire that you’re moving.

“Mom, how long is it gonna take?”

The Advice

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

By IRENE PUJADAS
Translated by JULIA SANCHES

Spurred by the idea that you are interdependent and would do well to lean on others (on the opinions, advice, and experiences of others), you’re roped into taking part in a general meeting to decide your future.

Some of your friends bring folders filled with graphs and statistics. One in particular comes bearing the works of authors, philosophers, historians, and psychoanalysts. Relevant passages are marked with Post-it notes.

Your family and friends only want what’s best for you, or rather, they want you to do something.