decides the fate of every love story, even when a cloth is sodden with wetness. He and she ride to town on a noon bus, she, sitting on his handkerchief. They have been sent for groceries, he, one week new, friend to her father, under him at the Consulate. Packed in with peeling leather bags, chickens, goats, dark-eyed men speaking Spanish, not one seat bare. Bruised mango fruit, split. Sticky floor. Her blood, fed by the rules of (her father?) a different country. His heart beating, they must sit very close, a man at the front ordering all windows stay shut. Swollen clouds, his white shirt wet patched, sunned skin peeping through (him?). His arm rims their seat back, whisking her shoulders at each dip in the dirt road. Moss scent and she hears palm trees, feels green-winged birds about them, scattering (her?). The voice inside full-throated, nearly a sob. Air, thrumming with flies. Her tan skirt, it breathes if his bare leg leans. If the invisible (god?) hand—the gold chain, cross at her neck—unclasps.
Further Reading
The Sickly Child
by Ed Makowski
During the First World WarEngland, like many countries,pursued emigrantsof adversarial nationsand placed them in internment camps. One German, while confined at Lancaster Castle, created a method to keep in shape despite confinement, which he named Contrology. The man had been a sickly child and kids made fun of his Greek name, calling him Pontius Pilate—Killer of […]
Solitude
by 蕭熠Jackie Hsaio
Translated from the Chinese by Lauren Harper
In her present life, she had about five friends. Since she frequented nowhere, she wouldn’t necessarily have met them. They were all from past lives, and she wasn’t sure why they’d remained. Like limescale build-up in the bend of a pipe, thickening with time and the water flow. Impossible to ignore after a while. One […]
from PAN TADEUSZ, BOOK 11: THE YEAR 1812 by Adam Mickiewicz (translated by Leonard Kress)
When the cattle were driven to pasture that spring, although they were famished and lean, they reluctantly went and would not venture near the spring corn that was already green, sprouting up from the frozen ground. Instead, they fell to the ground where the earth was plowed, where each cow in turn lowered its head, […]
