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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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Manuel’s Keepsake

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.

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Physical

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.

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Night Trip

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.

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The Torturers

Luciano Funetta
Translated by Scott Belluz

It was very late when he came home from work. His wife was sleeping; the apartment was dark. Despite the hour and the building’s noise regulations, he could still hear Frau Paffgen playing her piano.

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People Like Me

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.

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Excerpt from The Meaning of Daughter

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.

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Chumi

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.

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Green Scene

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.

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Floodway

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.

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Lucy & Matilda

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.

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Chapter Two: Battle at Diamond Head

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.

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188 Teeth

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.

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On a Scale of One to Ten

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.

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Actaeon

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.

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A Pipe with Holes Called “Zurna”

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.

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McCartney’s Autograph

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.

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To Be or Not To

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.

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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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