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Three Propositions of the White Wind

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.”

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Excerpt from Eva

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.”

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The Woman in the Murder House

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.”

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The Golden Hops

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.”

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The Taco Robbers From Last Week

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.”

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Weatherman

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.”

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The Embassy

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.”

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Out There

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?

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Life Stories

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?”

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Solution

Linda Morales Caballero
Translated by Marko Miletich, PhD

“An appointment with this man has become a waiting game.”

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Visitations

Caroline Fernelius

“On occasion, home-boundedness was almost frightening; she felt like an amphibian in a very tiny jar.”

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Bomarzo

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Looking Glass on East Tenth

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Anatomy of a Botched Assimilation

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.

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Lynnhaven

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.

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Desert Island Desiderium

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.

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Kafka Knocks at the Door

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.

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Mother Charges Me Per Minute

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.

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Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases

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