Luna Sicat-Cleto
Translated by Bernard Capinpin
“But what else could she do? That’s how it was. She was pregnant. Among all the other options, what was best for all would be to let go.”
Luna Sicat-Cleto
Translated by Bernard Capinpin
“But what else could she do? That’s how it was. She was pregnant. Among all the other options, what was best for all would be to let go.”
Nara Vidal
Translated by Emyr Humphreys
“It was vitally important I calm my father down. I betrayed the dismay in my eyes as I announced, yet again, that my mother was dead and that I had come home to a house that was hers forever.”
Darlene Eliot
“Octavia watched the onscreen car chase and shifted in her plastic chair. The chair, bolted to a desktop, was designed for wiry college students, not an eighty-two-year-old woman with abundant hips, long legs, and the impulse to gesture dramatically.”
Alberto Ortiz De Zarate
Translated by Whitni Battle
“With glazed eyes he stared fixedly at his glass mug, which looked so bright, and kept getting brighter as he watched his old yearnings and memories floating up to the surface in those minute amber bubbles, sometimes intense and sometimes colorless, just like his very existence.”
Steve Bargdill
“How awesome would it be to hit the Taco Bells in Columbus? Kick back on the couch with a couple tacos and drink Mountain Dew. We could have coasters to keep condensation off our coffee tables.”
Gillian Parrish
“When he wakes, he wakes in sweat, wakes in panic, turns to see if she’s in pain, if she wants water or his warm hand on her back, but she’s not there, and his heart falls into his stomach and he remembers.”
Mercury-Marvin Sunderland
“MOM. YOU CAN’T FOLLOW ME AROUND.”
Khalil AbuSharekh
“I connected with her because, like her, I sit in our family grocery store every day. I found them to be like us: family, traditions, war, and now they are a strong country. Japanese people are exactly like us, but advanced.”
Daryll Delgado
“Gestures, words, details surface like a relief as the background is chiseled away so effectively as to reveal the unmistakable scene. My god, what were we thinking? “
Robert(a) Ruisza Marshall
“It will, I tell myself, do no one harm if I post something about R, if I insinuate a greater relationship than was really there. No one will call me out or call me false. Do we really think the dead aren’t watching?”
Emilee Prado
“If you input more information while the memory is fragile, you can imbed the old memory with something new.”
Linda Morales Caballero
Translated by Marko Miletich, PhD
“An appointment with this man has become a waiting game.”
Caroline Fernelius
“On occasion, home-boundedness was almost frightening; she felt like an amphibian in a very tiny jar.”
Robert Lopez
“What’s happened between them is so complex it would be impossible for anyone to articulate it without the benefit of hindsight or omniscience.”
Cecilia Pavón
Translated by Jacob Steinberg
“It wasn’t just conjecture or a form of emotional bribery. It was a sincere impulse. I’ll gift him everything and close the shop.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isabella Rae Barrengos
My bedroom window served as a looking glass into my neighbor’s apartment on East Tenth. From my room, I could see into her kitchen, and from her kitchen, she could see into me.
The work of the critic is often relegated to criticism in the most literal sense—which is to say negativity—and it is a rare treat to engage in true praise. It reminds one why one set out to be a critic in the first place: for the love and admiration one feels for great art.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jesus Quintero
In 1986 we moved from Linda, California, where I went to Cedar Lane School with all the migrant children, to the neighboring town of Olivehurst, where I would go to school with the whites.
Kenny Williams
She had just turned twenty-six when she was called to step in, at the last minute, as the attending at the Weatherall Home for Girls.
Chuck Mobley
I live on a mostly deserted island on the edge of the Sonoran Desert in Southern California. It is an actual 25-acre island surrounded by a 25-acre lake, which is surrounded by a 200-acre, 18-hole golf course.
John Better Armella
Translated by Michelle Mirabella
An army of red ants crosses my path on the way from the living room to the kitchen. Marching in a perfect line, they carry an enormous, shiny cockroach.
Mialise Carney
Mother charges me per minute. I sit in her creme-colored office, my ankles tucked delicately behind one another, clammy hands clasped and bunching sweatily into the thick folds of my skirt.