Issue 24 | Spring 2021

Spring is here and so is a new issue of Your Impossible Voice! For our twenty-fourth issue, we have daring new work from Jesus Quintero, Bri Stoever, Rebeca Abidail Flores, Curt Saltzman, Doina Ruști (translated by Ileana Marin) Max Blue, Isabella Rae Barrengos, Nadia Villafuerte (translated by Pennell Somsen), Monica Macansantos, Gabriela Ruivo Trindade (translated by Andrew McDougall), Kathleen Bryson, Edward Smallfield, Kristin Fogdall, Valerie Coulton, and Peter Grandbois. Cover art by Matthew Felix Sun.

Purple Ribbon

Bri Stoever

“My wife will be home soon.”
“Don’t worry about her.” She tosses her long ebony hair over her shoulder, trying to hook her bra. He feels like he should help her, but the paranoia keeps him at bay. Every car that trots up the road sounds like the slamming front door. Each time a headlight passes the window like a helicopter searchlight, his heart seizes.

read more

Interrupting a Roadside Memorial

Rebeca Abidail Flores

When Rosa and Maria first arrived, the candles were already lit and in rows of one red, one white, one red, one white, all with the sticker of La Virgen de Guadalupe facing the street. There was a small altar set up on the chain-link fence near the railroad tracks.

read more

The Snow Globe

Curt Saltzman

Dad and I were working the Rotary Club booth that year at the Halloween fair. We’d curtained off a space in the rear of the booth and taped a cardboard sign I’d stenciled with the words “JACK’S DIME FORTUNES” to an upright.

read more

Excerpt from The Ghost in the Mill

Doina Ruști
Translated by Ileana Marin

I. The Secret Life of Adela Nicolescu

1. Last year, sometime in November, I noticed the novel in the window of the Sadoveanu bookstore. It stood out because of the big Arial letters of its title: The Secret Life of Adela Nicolescu Told by Florian Pavel.

read more

My character

Valerie Coulton

My character never slept in the street by the Chinese gate.

My character had inconsistent handwriting and a scribbled signature, like a hieroglyph.

read more

Her Name is Sonora

Nadia Villafuerte
Translated by Pennell Somsen

It was as if the mirror reflected only my image and not hers. We shared a room, but my imprint was everywhere: my clothes, my dressing table with sprays, my bottles of glitter and perfume, my calendar attached to the wall with thumbtacks.

read more

Inheritances

Monica Macansantos

The night Andrew received his mother’s call, he was unbuttoning his shirt in front of his bathroom mirror, savoring the lazy, pleasant buzz that lingered in his head after a night of drinking and sauntering down the warm, noise-filled streets of Makati with friends who could drop everything at a moment’s notice to celebrate his good fortune with him on a Tuesday night.

read more

Blue Eyes: An Excerpt from Another Voice

Gabriela Ruivo Trindade
Translated by Andrew McDougall

Fourth Voice (Maria Filomena)
Estremoz, 3 April 1974

Since my Zé went to war, things have been tough for me. A dizziness in my head I can barely stay on my feet with, an unbearable ringing in my ear.

read more

First we are lost

Peter Grandbois

the yellow jackets buzz about the yard
more and more I find it difficult to go on

my son hit their nest with the lawnmower
days churn through patterns of heat and dust

read more

Pseudokhristos

Kathleen Bryson

The little man in the machine blows a little horn and this will be my last sermon to the lot of you. Artificial intelligence drips through the computer that allows us to peer through the ages, and the little man caught inside blows toot toot.

read more

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This