Chris Kraus

As Paul Schimmel astutely observed to the writer of the Los Angeles Times August, 2006 Amboy obituary: “[T]he amalgam or juxtaposition of seemingly arbitrary elements, which Amboy was as adept at exploring and then quickly stockpiling, exemplifies the experience one might have while surfing the internet.”

Xavier Queipo
Translated by Jacob Rogers

I
Stillness

In the beginning everything was orange. Orange like the texture of silk, like an orange vein in every possible hue of orange. What I mean is: an orange cloud, an orange magma, an orange gel, an orange sensation.

Rachel Ballenger

This morning I couldn’t get any writing done because of the great rape that was happening all around me. Across from the deck a squirrel thundered up a tree, a horny male on her tail. She leapt from the branches of one oak to another.

C.I. Nwodim

You chose the medical school with the anatomy lab on the fifth floor. Most of the other schools keep their bodies in the basement.

Pedro Ugarte
Translated by Alan Williams

I could not have known at the time, but that was to become the most important day of my life.

I had just come home from school and was leaving my bag in the kitchen, when from the end of the corridor emerged my father’s deep, low voice.

Michael Leal García

Abel sat upon their yellowing birch and took in the night sky. He had to imagine the stars for the light pollution that blotted them out. But if he squinted just right, he could see how the lights up in Dodger Stadium looked like dandelions.

Geri Lipschultz

Before her arrival—without the tendril and buds—her mother had wanted a boy. Later, she would make vaginas everywhere, shifting her arms to see the cleft between forearm and upper arm, to see mushed flesh between a calf folded against thigh, between her thumb and forefinger.

Moinul Ahsan Saber
Translated by Shabnam Nadiya

It was afternoon when Pocha returned with the news. Grinning, he pushed open the tin door of Ramzan’s hut and entered. His eyes were of different sizes, making his gaze a bit strange.

Jody Azzouni

1.

Ican’t stand it, Lisa yells at me. (Yells. Really.) He sits in the bedroom all day long, staring at that giant screen. Watching cartoons and imitating their expressions and sounds. Baby boomers, he says, and then he sounds like Porky Pig. Bugs Bunny. Or Popeye.

Cristina Vega

She called the main attraction a grindylow like she called her bared teeth a smile. She went around the line of anxious visitors to check for tickets while the lights in the tent began to brighten into consciousness.

Padma Prasad

In her mid-thirties, Fern, the sculptor, was about five feet tall, very bony and pale, her face long and elegant, with a strong pointed chin.

John Jodzio

Last summer I had sex with a hair stylist named Lori once or twice a week depending on her energy level and whether or not she’d made lemon bars.

Kirin Khan

Everyone knew the baby would be a boy. Mahjabin’s belly hung low, and she ate lots of meat, and her rear swelled upwards, these telltale signs.

B. Mason

Christine’s return to work prompted a party in the conference room. There were cupcakes and hugs and gag gifts, and thirtysomething executives mused on the preciousness of life.

Peter H.Z. Hsu

Theresa Choi and her father are sitting on his couch. They’re in her father’s living room in front of her father’s new Ectoscope™ Screen. Dad is having trouble with the technology.

Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite

… and his daddy looked like T.S. Eliot, round the age of 17 wearin that, on the out, thriftshop, brown, snug fittin tweed suit and those govt., welly wrangled pair of glasses. Athalwolf was a smooth killa. He said that he wonted to take a life.

Jesse Hassenger

When Chessa’s boyfriend of three years lost his job, she dropped him straight away. As with their arguments about health insurance and vacation policies, Chessa took the company’s side.

Nina Schuyler

Of all the little girls in the world, how lucky she was to belong to Kate. Kate, with her cute dresses and pleated skirts, her twelve rainbow-colored tights and headbands. But Kate wasn’t only a girlie girl.

Cathy Rose

I put the house up for sale after my wife died and moved into an apartment across town—a one-bedroom unit, ground floor, back-facing, with a patio. The complex was corporate-run with the management right onsite.

Thorsten Nagelschmidt
Translated by Timothy DeMarco

I’m not a photographer. The camera I took most of these pictures with was given to me one afternoon on a street in Vancouver. I sat writing on the steps of a house on Howe Street, near the corner of Nelson, when a young woman in a beat-up parka walked by.

Marlin M. Jenkinsz

The cancer grew inside you, eventually protruded between your ribs and surfaced on your skin in blackened bulbs. It looked like tar on one side of your torso, expanding down to fill your belly button, down further into urethra, behind your knees, under your toenails—upward to chest, nipples, throat, cheekbones.

Chelsea Harris

There was that time I got out of my car at a red light and hopped in somebody else’s. He was a dad and his kid was strapped into the back and shame on him for not locking his doors.