Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada
On Friday she decided to risk the blessing of her mother’s beating. Left the washing on the clothesline out back despite the rain. She knew well what was coming, her retribution: her mother’s handprint on her cheek, bruises stamped round her throat, welts branded on her thighs.
Rob McClure Smith
”It’s raining diamonds on Uranus right now.” Julia smirks, staring rapt at her phone in that irritating way she does. She has the sense of humor of a ten-year-old boy.
Silver Damsen
Rachel’s curly reddish-brown hair bounced in slow motion as she explained the unfairness of her parents’ insisting that she NOT come out as lesbian to her grandmother, who was over ninety, dying, and thought computers a fad—that was when she remembered they existed at all.
Molly Yingling
He could be handsome but for the tooth. The shriveled front tooth that juts from his mouth: gray, dead, but stubbornly suctioned to his gums. It makes his grins menacing; grimaces.
Brooks Sterritt
The building’s facade was smooth concrete, giving it a bunker-like appearance, though oddly topped with an ornate cornice. Its function was announced in neon: “RUSSIAN, TURKISH, SAUNA, BANYA, TANNING, DAY SPA, MASSAGE.”
Dia Felix
I woke up with my wig on, well, wait, no, I, woke up with a social panic and an itchy head, soon thereafter diagnosed myself: WIG. Well, you know you shouldn’t look at yourself in the mirror, anyway, dumb stupid head, bloated pumpkin, but especially now, but look I have to, to see what’s up with my head, I need more information, the information oh my god, hahaha.
Lise Gauvin
Translated by Aliya Esmail
Eight O’clock
Just a few details distinguish this building from the rest of them. A slightly wider facade, shutterless windows decorated with a white trim give it a bourgeois air in a street otherwise noted for its motley appearance.
Ricardo Piglia
Translated by Robert Croll
IN THE BAR
Alife is not divided into chapters, Emilio Renzi said to the bartender of El Cervatillo that afternoon, leaning on the bar, standing before the mirror and the bottles of whiskey, vodka, and tequila lined up on the shelves.
Miguel Barnet
Translated by George Henson
The sky at this hour melts into the ocean. The egrets are dark specks against the backdrop. A single blinking yellow beacon lights up the rocky strip along the malecón.
Joanna Ruocco
Four years ago, I was released from a long hiatus in my life and moved to the city nearest the town where I was born. I found old friends who shared an apartment, and I asked if I could sleep on their couch until I found a place of my own.
By Jillian McManemin
I zipped out of the city and merged onto a tree-lined highway heading upstate. This road led to the manicured, precious towns of the Hudson Valley. Rehabilitation centers hid in the Palisades.
By Curt Saltzman
The three boys leaned against the chain-link fence above the dry wash. There was Johnny and Tom and another boy who’d wanted to tag along. The day was hot and they felt the heat like a weight pushing down on them.
By Jason Hamilton
Something happens when you reach a certain age without having children. You become the guy who should have kids but doesn’t.
By Michael Agugom
He wanted to outsmart himself. He stood before the mirror and waited. His reflection in the mirror also waited. He wanted to prove to his other-self in the mirror that he was an island boy, a boy from the creeks.
By Ihsan Abdel Quddous
Translated from Nabeel M. Yaseen
I am a Palestinian refugee. The word refugee evokes struggle, strife, injured dignity, pride, and the fight to liberate the Arab world from the yoke of occupation.
By Nicole Mestre
My stepmother grabbed the car’s rusty window handle and spun it around once. From the backseat of my dad’s mustard-yellow Hornet, I watched the glass creak down two inches before getting stuck. Her head bobbed back and forth as she tried to force the handle back around.
By Miriam Karpilov
Translated by Jessica Kirzane
In the middle of my quiet, bitter cry, in the lonely silence of that strange house, I heard a quiet knock on my door. I shook myself awake and covered my head with a pillow to dampen the noise, but the stubborn knocking did not let up.
By Stephanie Dickinson
Los Angeles sits, watching, in that green slow way swamps have. Behind her blonde hair (tinted the same as mine) and complexion that color has died in, there’s marshy bog, iron and stone.
By M.C. Zendejas
I. WINTER
He’d asked two people before finding a guy. The whole time he kept saying it was just to relax after a long day at work. That this wasn’t a normal thing for him. The guy didn’t really seem to be listening.
By Elisabeth Sheffield
Have ye no other kin ye can turn to?What a question, coming from you, Madmaeve. Didn’t you write in your blog, just a month or so ago, before you left home, about the familial prison#?
By John Better Armella
Translated by George Bert Henson
Whether it’s a transvestite taking a drag on her damp Pielroja on some corner of barrio Santa Fe, a middle manager asking with feigned dignity, “Marlboro, please,” or a precocious little girl smoking her punk brother’s butts in secret, cigarettes possess the brevity necessary to tell a story, not in the style of Jim Jarmusch, where they accompany an espresso, and the black-and-white screen accentuates a bitter encounter between Tom Waits and Iggy Pop.
By Laurie Stone
I was walking in a forest along a leaf-strewn path. The moon glowed yellow, and I could see my outline. I was seeing myself from the perspective of the moon.
By Luise Maier
Translated by Frances Jackson
I played My mother is poorly with a friend. We did so using toothpicks that we’d snapped in half. I jammed half a toothpick between my top and bottom rows of teeth so that my lips wouldn’t close.
By Jasper Henderson
He was a white male writer, and—despite having kissed a few boys at a Halloween party last year, even letting one stroke his bare chest, despite the occasional fantasy in which other boys featured — he knew he was for all practical and self-image purposes straight.
Dahna Cohen-Schwartz
Grace held out a bag of maggot-colored stems, and Jordanna apprehensively took one. “I just think I should take less than you guys, maybe,” Jordanna said.
By Rey-Philip Genaldo
The first thing I told the ER doctor over at St. Francis Memorial Hospital was I had appendicitis. I knew this because of WebMD, obviously.
By James Kramer
The video’s host froze, his arms held up in mock surprise, cue cards there still in hand. The clip wouldn’t load any further. Emi lay on the bed and watched the buffering icon circle in the center of her iPad.
By Justice McPherson
My eyes scanned the small studio apartment, making sure the power was off and that I wasn’t just imagining things.
By Sara Kachelman
The town had one good dog in it and the dog belonged to a rapist. When the rapist walked the dog each afternoon, the schoolchildren would run out into the schoolyard and stick their fingers through the fence.
By Daniel Rivas
You don’t know how disappointed you can be by life until you’re looking at it from somewhere high up and remote, the life you used to live so small, you can hardly believe it was ever real.