Photo by Cristina Conti / Stock.adobe.com.
“Death by literature”? Despite her fatal diagnosis, Leila Ross clung to reading till the very end.These were the final lines of Mum’s request:Alt…
Fiction
Portrait d’Eleno de Céspedes by LLarchevêque / Wikimedia In sixteenth-century Spain, the Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition is facing one of its most complicated cases ever: Elena Césped…
Photo by Rey Seven / Unsplash.com Avid reader Andor Femin and the narrator of this flash fiction don’t always see eye to eye, but their observations about reading are always amusing. Andor Femin…
Photo by PR Image Factory / Stock.adobe.com. A CT scan leads to a surprising discovery in this short fiction from Australia. Clara’s first (and last) acting role was that of Medusa, the Greek mon…
Digital illustration by Emily Holson, Eyes of the Withholder (2024) Tensions build between a child and a tree, both grappling for the attention of a mother. The lemon tree was a gift fro…
Photo by Carl Raw / Unsplash.com Welcome to Game Land, where your every pleasure will be satisfied. The substitute asked the pupils to say their names. There was Onni, May, Jonna, Helmi, and Her…
Photo by Shunsuke Ono / Unsplash.com A lover of love, everything Momo does is designed to give her the advantage. They pretty much spent their days sifting through the freckles, moles, and pimple…
Photo of Ogiek animal horn by Survival International © Survivalinternational.org Deciding between his mother’s sweet love and his father’s conditional approval, Kimurguk endures a harrowing rite o…
Illustration by Apirak / Stock.adobe.com. Trigger warning for mental health, threats of violence and sexual violence, and suicidal ideation. Be careful what you wish for—especially online, especi…
Photo by Edwin Tan / istockphoto.com Trigger warning for suicide and graphic violence. Desperate to have a child, a couple takes an unorthodox route to conception. But did they bargain with the d…
Photo by Joelee Creative / Stock.adobe.com In this excerpt from a classic Argentine horror novel, something sinister visits a bathing woman in her new apartment. “The high heels! The high heels!”…
Illustration by fran_kie / Unsplash.com Three groups of children dine at long tables inside cages in this claustrophobic tale of no escape. We, my brothers and sisters and I, have broad dining ta…
Painting by Liza Martín, Untitled (2024), oil on canvas, 20x26cm. Twenty-five degrees Celsius at midday on the winter solstice: the collected humidity of an entire continent bears mercilessly, sha…
Photo by Hugo Gomes/Wirestock Creators / Stock.adobe.com It’s 2050, and five African nations have surrendered their sovereignty to form a new nation. To some, it was unfathomable that the r…
Photo by driftwood / Stock.adobe.com The offspring’s appetites know no end. What’s a mother, any mother—even that mother who nurtures us all—to do? The wound is smaller than last time, tiny…
Анна Удод - stock.adobe.com I. Northward January 2, Arrival By night they flew, korvat kuin korpit, ears like ravens, who hear a bark. They listened to the forest rustling; to the storms in…
Sabrina Zarco, Tlacuache Medicine (2023), acrylic on canvas / zarcomontoyagaleria.bigcartel.com After a near-death experience, two beings explore memory, art, and medicine. The babies ha…
The Woman He was a disgrace of a man. The lowest of the low. He pounded the table, every blow making the kerosene lamp shudder. The noise was accompanied by intermittent bursts of neurotic ranting…
An ordinary day in Ávila darkens following a neighborly intervention. Setting a succulent into the window box outside, Maria spotted the boys from 2D in the courtyard below. Three brick buildings an…
Photo by Joachim Pressl on Unsplash A few days into a third lockdown, a cat and her human companion have differing views about how to handle an army of slugs attacking the petunias.…
Photo by Abigail Keenan on Unsplash A young woman with two degrees and no job hits the streets of Palermo looking for work with only a Dorothy Parker poem to sustain her. Ratty sli…
In Colombian writer Octavio Escobar Giraldo’s first publication in English, it isn’t only the parishioner saying her Hail Marys. “I confess, Father. I confess that I am happy about the dea…
In this fraught meeting between father and daughter, a woman rescues what she can from an estranged relationship. two weeks ago, when i saw my father, i wrote, “dear diary, this morning wh…
A woman gives birth in a room where all the windows are covered with pages of a book to be burned. The woman inside, the women outside: all wait for the author. Luz is going to scream. She…
Dereje Demissie (Ethiopia), Psychscape (2009) A grandmother thinks of her two kite-flying grandchildren each time she wakes and sees the birds outside her window. The windo…
December 19, 2024
December 02, 2024
