You lie awake, tired and lonesome underneath a horrifyingly new patchwork blanket of your dead grandfather’s old clothing. The boy dropped you off thirty minutes ago, and you walked the half mile up your secluded driveway in the middle of the last dark hour before dawn broke. The pine trees buzzed with morning birds and […]
Nonfiction
Changing
What Kind of Parent Lets a Thirteen-Year-Old Cancel Her Bat Mitzvah?
by Leonard Kress
1. My favorite episode of Jill Soloway’s tragi-comic Transparent focuses on the family’s youngest daughter, Ali Pfefferman, who at age 13 refuses to celebrate her Bat Mitzvah. This is no small matter, since her mother has spent thousands on preparations—food, invitations, reception, booze, etc., and she’s both horrified and humiliated by the prospect of canceling. At first, […]
Unrequited
by Kelly Miller
I’m masturbating across the hall from her dying. I’ve just finished giving her a bed bath. With that crazy half-detachment required when someone you love has stopped being that person. And has become instead this sickness. A moany dissolving body to be turned and agitated and tended. She can’t take soap or touch. I squeezed water from a soft […]
The Shalom Sisters
by Deborah La Garbanza
ISTANBUL, 2014 The days of the Pudding Shop are over. In the sixties and seventies it was the way station of hippie dreamers, whose eyes and hearts looked East. It was the start of the trip, the end of the trip, a place to exchange energy. The restaurant is still there, at the bend of […]
Rt now sum1 is writin a Youtube Com3nt
by Tyler Gillespie
He stands at the front of a crowd gathered for a Las Vegas mall’s grand opening. The boy vogues, whips his hands around his face. He strikes a pose. Local news reporters drone on about the mall, but no one pays attention to them. All eyes focus on 15-year-old Brendan Jordan. A few days later, […]
Messages from Howard
by David Eye
Howard followed me out of Stuyvesant Park on a June night in 1995. Inside the park, in the shadows from streetlamps through trees, we had checked each other out, but hadn’t spoken. I turned left out of the tall iron gateway, walking north on Second Avenue, and Howard followed a few paces behind. When he […]
The Blond Sheep
by Merrill Cole
Just having finished the back and biceps workout, I walk into the men’s locker room at Holmes Place on Hermannplatz. When I hear female voices gasping loudly, I leap towards the back and go through the door that leads to the pool and sauna areas. In the hallway in front of the pool, there are […]
From New York City to Mar Chiquita: Evocations of a Singular Friendship
by Consuelo Arias
“Now more than ever, my words conjure your silence” (dedication to John Anthes, from El libro de la muerte) In a text from Invitación al polvo, La nada de nuestros nunca cuerpos, Manuel Ramos Otero writes: “The elderly women of Mondoñedo bring ears of corn to the little Galician girl, over which falangist flies flutter, flies who never […]
Nichts passiert in München (Nothing Happens in Munich)
by Alicia Anderson
I tug my collar higher to shield my cheeks from the wind. Winter days bleed together, muddling over the edges of one to the next. There are flickers of joy, embers banked beyond commute and cubicle. There are days tinged by sorrow. We’re not meant to live in emotional extremes all of the time. Over […]
Cows and Wows: Why India Works Depite Itself and What We Can Learn from Its Example
by David Kirby (photos by Barbara Hamby)
PUT YOUR STAMP ON LILI When Barbara says she wants to go to India, the first thing I say is, “I’m not driving in that cockamamie country.” When it comes to driving in other countries, mine is a checkered history. I still don’t know what the traffic signs mean in France and Italy, and I’ve got […]
