Photo: Zoltan Tasi / UnsplashA mother’s conflict with her daughter causes her to reflect on Khawnaa, a mathematician-astrologer and light of the Bengali medieval court.
When my daughter rais…
Fiction
Birds Watching, by Jenny Kendler, part of Indicators: Artists on Climate Change at Storm King Art Center, depicts one hundred eyes of bird species threatened or endangered by climat…
Photo: Philipp Bock/Flickr Banned from entering soccer stadiums since Iran’s 1979 revolution, the young women in this story hatch a risky plan to get inside the stadium on game day. She had…
Photo: Jordan Whitt/Unsplash In this coming-of-age tale with a dark twist, two brothers engage in a deathly game. MY BROTHER LEMMY taught me how to die. I was then eight, an…
Photo: Annie Pratt/Unsplash While on a pilgrimage to the site of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia, which sparked the Arab Spring, the narrator meditates on revolution, death, and imm…
Un Uovo Vuoto, illustration by Damiano Cenderelli Italian sci-fi master Clelia Farris conjures a solitary egglike being and the company eager to provide a piercing solution. I AM T…
Photo: Bishnu SarangiA girl is forced to reexamine the myths surrounding her aunt when her aunt moves in with the family in Texas after leaving her husband in India. Is she more goddess, more witc…
Photo: NettPix/PixabayIn this story from Asja Bakić’s debut collection, Mars, two women exist in a dangerous symbiosis. Lichen: nature’s chaos. A body of algae and mushroom, the symb…
Photo: Wine Dharma/UNsplashIn his bildungsroman, the “People’s Poet of Azerbaijan” describes a time when “all the world smelled of bread.” I’d taken off my clothes and climbed into bed. But I…
“Gravity” by Dani MontesinosFeet to Feet My wife and I have a way of sleeping that might seem a bit bizarre: neither face-to-face nor back-to-back, but with the soles of our feet pressed together. O…
llustration by Shanti SparrowA nine-year-old wonders whether her story of a publicly shamed elephant is responsible for her immigrant mother’s mysterious condition. O nce upon a recent time,…
Photo: Erkan Utu/Pexels What I see upon entering a hospital room in St. Paul at dawn. My nieces asleep, one on a cot against the wall, the other in a chair beside the bed, holding my sister’…
Photo: Michael Gaida/Pixabay Following a hysterectomy, a woman is drawn to the gothic ambience of a stone statuary garden at her lover’s family’s home. My third sleepless night in t…
Illustration by Jen Rickard BlairFor “El Negro” Fontanarrosa, for his lawless fat men . . . A 2050 public health campaign goes too far, resulting in allergy-free municipalities, fines for obesity,…
The doctor knows about my love of writing. She brings me a handful of white paper and some sharp pencils. I sit at the table and am frozen. What should I write? How? Where should I begin?…
A backbiting violin section, duettists whose honest feedback to one another is less welcome than first thought, and a tuner who sets a pianist on edge: in this trio of short fictions, m…
Photo: James Stringer/Flickr A chance encounter with a magnetic stranger shifts something inside the narrator of this story set in the streets of Tórshavn. I first met her around th…
Photo: Steve Oprey/Pixabay In this story from Milena Solot’s manuscript A Possible Place, the recently named matron of a successful whorehouse in Mexico City walks into the car…
A small birch tree with arctic thyme, lupine, sea thrift, angelica, marsh marigolds, welsh poppies, oriental poppies, rhubarb and red currant. Watercolor by Roshni Robert A woman’s comp…
Photo: Chris Devers/Flickr A bar mitzvah brings multiple generations of a family together in celebration, far from the reach of the evil eye. NEW ROCHELLE…
Photo: Sarah McGee/Flickr While visiting a kibbutz to give a lecture, and after dining on both hot desert-root vegetable soup and sushi, the speaker becomes the listener when someone in…
Blood War, 2016, by Jia How Lee. The concept art is based on the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. Years ago the man got married and years ago the man became unhappy in his marriage. T…
Photo: Skitterphoto/Pixabay Outside the Special Instrument Factory, protesters rally against war, corruption, and the latest in protective head gear: the Ex-Box. Procrustes-1 was t…
illustration by Michael Vincent Manalo Anything might happen beyond a door opened by a perfect wife. to the memory of María Varela Osorio If you should meet her on the street, cro…
Photo: Daria Nepriakhina/Pixabay T he old man lived in a vast, dark house, windows blind with frosted glass, door adorned with a heavy bronze knocker. At one time or another, all five of his children…
