Issue 30 Fiction | The Common

Ellen

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

Giving birth hurt much less than I had expected. There was a feeling like someone’s hands were tying my organs into intricate knots and then loosening them. Finally, a great loosening, and a wail, a tiny squirming marvel lowered into my arms. During pregnancy, I had been afraid of the pain. It seemed wrong to be afraid, so I didn’t discuss it, not even with Andrew. I had never experienced overwhelming physical pain; nothing more than a fractured ankle in ninth grade, a couple of bad toothaches. I knew this would be worse—I just wished there was a way to know precisely how much worse.

Islands

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By CASEY WALKER

Twelve years ago, in waters off the Azores, my father was thrown overboard on a whale-watching skiff and my mother thought she could save him. The trip had been my mother’s dream. She hadn’t seen the islands since she was a child, visiting her grandparents. My father’s overconfidence about boating in bad weather, an unanticipated storm surge, a possibly intoxicated boat pilot—that was the tragedy of my mother’s ancestral homecoming. No bodies were ever recovered. In lieu of caskets, the funeral director set up an oversized portrait taken on my parents’ wedding day. That young couple, with expressions formally posed, was all but unrecognizable to me.

Smith

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By CORY BEIZER

Before my mother can return to her life and stop watching me eat, she says she must give me a dog. She swears a companion is the only way she’ll feel safe leaving me alone. It makes no sense. How can I take care of a dog if I am failing to take care of myself? She says that’s the point, to learn how to care, and if the dog dies, well, then she’ll know when to come back. I tell her no. My beloved cow figurine is companion enough. Its thick apotropaic horns will fend off the evil that is sure to return.

Mermaid of Longnook

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By LAURA GERINGER BASS

Carla wore a mask while trudging down the precipitous dune that shadowed Longnook Beach, her heaven on earth. She had brought from her city stash a colorful assortment of boldly patterned Mexican face coverings to make the necessity of protecting herself from airborne viral droplets less depressing. But bright flowers and butterflies, stout yellow ears of corn, and iconic unibrow Frida Kahlo faces made it no easier to breathe on the descent.

Most days, Carla used the shaft of her sheathed sun umbrella to steady herself while maneuvering over uneven ground. Today, Tom wasn’t there to help her carry her beach chair, so she had left the heavy umbrella at home. She wasn’t one of those old ladies who needed a cane, was she? A grinding creak from her arthritic left knee followed by an aching twinge and throb of pain from her right hip warned her that the uphill return would be a challenge.

The Sixteenth Brother

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By A. J. BERMUDEZ

The way Khalida tells the story is this: for two hundred years, Riad Jennaa has belonged to the descendants of Abdellah Bensaïd. But, she is swift to point out, not all his descendants. In Morocco, since time immemorial and perhaps even before then, women have received half the inheritance of their male counterparts. She tells this part with a shrug. It’s not fair, but it’s the Quran.

Faction of None

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By TAMAS DOBOZY

The videos of Christmas dinner were for Mom, or so Pete said. His gift, honoring the hours she’d spent preparing the meals. But he couldn’t fool me—or her. He filmed the dinners because it got him out of eating what she cooked: the tofurkey he hated, the beet salad that made him gag, the quinoa that sparkled like a plateful of sand. Pete would rather have starved than eaten food he didn’t like, which was most food, staying skinny as a nail with the hunger he preferred, as if craving was better than sustenance, desire superior to satisfaction, and want itself his personal god.

All posts tagged: Issue 30 Fiction

Ellen

Islands

Smith

Mermaid of Longnook

The Sixteenth Brother

Faction of None

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