Julieta García González
Translated by Toshiya Kamei

Adriana bit her nails—most of them had jagged edges—circled around the table a few times, and sat down to wait.

Kelly Krumrie

Every year at St. Agatha’s there is a physical. Each homeroom takes turns lining up down the hall, and a few sisters and the nurse hand out clipboards to the girls.

Hwang Jungeun
Translated by Mirae Yang

Hanssi and Kossi had lost their way around the area.
Gom and Mim found them at the corner of a street. Hanssi was wearing a trapper hat and Kossi had a scarf wrapped around her neck.

Deven James Philbrick

Edna Steinsaltz was the kind of woman who, wrinkled face aged with wisdom and wine, always answered your questions with another less clear question.

Alexia Nader

A girl from Merjan’s school got a boyfriend, which would have been the beginning of the same life as every woman in the town—girlfriend, wife, mother, lover, corpse—not of interest at all, except the couple got into the habit of playing a dangerous game in open air.

Jorge Largo
Translated by David Pegg

I don’t really know why I don’t like watching movies at home. My girlfriends set up their devices in bed, in their living rooms; they place their computers, their cell phones, on a side table.

Masha Tupitsyn

In Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, the word futile appears in a section called “Waiting.” In it, Barthes writes: “I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. This can be futile, or immensely pathetic: in Erwartung (Waiting), a woman waits for her lover, at night, in the forest.

Casey Plett

I was out front at the bar after closing time with a bunch of other weirdos. This short guy with curly hair and I started talking. You want to get a king can? His name was Owen.

Kyle Lung

Beneath the redwoods and past the dumpsters, children scream like they’re playing or being sawed in half. I scratch Matilda’s head, she loves that, she hums.

Eddie P. Gomez

We took a flight from San Francisco to Oahu on a balmy morning in early October, risking a small window of opportunity. In Honolulu, high rises poked at the sky in the distance as the taxi raced away from the airport.

Margherita Arco

Just as we were finishing breakfast downstairs, a loud bang resonated through the clapboard house; our father had let the door of the master bedroom fall to a close, announcing his advance on the breakfast table.

Leanne Grabel

We talked about joy. It was my eighth session with Dr. Misaka, a small woman with beautiful shoes the color of cognac. Kaiser had referred me out-of-network for ten sessions with a psychiatrist.

Cástulo Aceves
Translated by Michael Langdon

1.
The young man studies the computer monitor as his right hand moves beneath his desk. His name is Arturo, and he is a second-semester business major. He lives alone in a building of foreign students.

Berna Durmaz
Translated by Dayla Rogers

Jemafer set the zurna’s wet mouthpiece against the iron headboard and lay down to give his soul easy passage out his throat. He waited. As he lay there, he didn’t bother shooing away the things rushing through his mind and from his tongue.

Jonathan Jones

Visiting Hours
I’m waiting where the holes in the ruins and the pavements overflow. These songs just seem to slow things down. A letter like a straight look through the mirror you give me to follow.

Ascher/Straus

Ten a.m. the next morning Jimmy’s got the ancient Mr. Coffee zzz-zzz-ing and chugging and his laundry going in Junie’s half-size machine.
“I could eat some scrambled eggs.”

Xurxo Borrazás
Translated by Jacob Rogers

“So, Xisto’s boy fixed up the house?”
She had announced herself by banging on the door with an open fist, and those were her first words, open-fisted. At noon, I was a ghost: I hadn’t washed up or eaten, my head was throbbing, I was hunched over, the light hurt my eyes, and my breath stank.

Cidinha da Silva
Translated by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia

“Girl, all that glitters sure ain’t gold. What does anyone see in that songamonga, anyway?” one woman remarks to her neighbor, as they sit out, sunbathing in front of the condo. Their neighbor walks across the yard carrying several grocery bags stuffed with lettuce.

Marream Krollos

Oh, yeah, I would say he was good. He was really good, it’s a shame what happened. I guess it was like, because of how he wants to know the details of your body, or how he wanted to know all kinds of shit about you.

Ivan Jozić
Translated by Marta Huber

Sometimes I travel alone and that’s all right; tonight, however that’s not the case. Here in the East, the night is born out of the winter’s pupil, the taxi driver’s heart, or something just as cold.

Evelyn Martinez

Life or death? I am twenty-six years old, standing at the edge of a scenic overlook a few miles from Lake Arrowhead. Far below, the Inland Empire extends its freeway and housing tracts into the orange-gray haze.

Lydia Armstrong

The very first time it happened, I was fifteen, walking across an overpass in the middle of the night on my way to see a boy.

Joelle Lambert

In the springtime, the ants in the house get out of control. I lose sleep over it. I have tried so many things to rid my house of ants.

Mannika Mishra

So far, she had seen only one person wearing sunglasses indoors.
The sky outside was stripped to brazen blue and inspired recklessness; grim forecasts for later in the day couldn’t possibly be right.

Sabahattan Ali
Translated by Daniel Koehler

Once again, I was out of work, and this time I was living off the generosity of a relative who owned a private hospital in Ankara.

Clara E. Ronderos
Translated by Mary G. Berg

Gabriela didn’t have a lot of respect for Professor Millán. His esoteric assignments made the writing workshop a space that encouraged exaggeration and false prophecies.

Rachel Nagelberg

I left and changed my shape. I had been stifled, not lived. I rented an apartment on a one-way street—each day on the way to my car I passed a sign that read End.

D-L Alvarez

This was a Mexican restaurant in Oakland. Milo was in the back area, taking the corner stage to sing karaoke. It was 1998 and Milo was celebrating his birthday, but then the plug was pulled, mid-“Never Let Me Down Again.”

Ty Hall

She never let me in her bed, not at first anyway. She said she didn’t let any men in her bed. I didn’t believe her, seeing from the hallway purple velvet Velcro hand restraints wrapped around her headboard’s posts.