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.

Jorge Enrique Botero
Translated by David Feller Pegg

We have been under attack for over an hour and I have yet to fire a single shot. It’s almost dawn and old Gala will soon notice the R-15 fluttering in my hands.

Mike Dressel

It was the summer I was into armpits.
It was the week the mercury didn’t dip below 98 degrees.
It was the weekend we didn’t get back together.

Christopher Clubb

The first time I begged for money on the street was while I was in Italy. I had been living in England, studying abroad at Lancaster University.

Karen An-hwei Lee

Today, I wake up on the wrong side of the universe and realize, with a shock of recognition, my dear heavenly stars, I’m an octopus.

Keith Carver

Mehmet first saw tits at Kiki Damron’s trailer, in Gobles, deep into summer vacation, between grades five and six. They were hers to show, and nothing seemed wrong with it.

Jessica Love

When Lana dove into the deep end of the country club pool, she was completely submerged only for a brief moment, before her pink, plastic floaties tugged her upward by her biceps to the surface.

J. Weintraub

They were alone in the elevator, and then he was gone, and she hardly realized what had happened to her as she slid to the floor, her back against the wall, and when it reached the top and shuddered to a halt, she fell forward among the broken bags of groceries.

Alvin Lu

At some point it was decided there should be a hall. The idea started as a public square.

Luisa Valenzuela
Translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz

The hotel in Marseilles has a Moroccan motif. An interesting and creative way to renovate a big old house with two rooms on every floor and a steep staircase. Luckily a young man carried my suitcase up the steep stairs.