Russell Scott Valentino

“If English was good enough for Jesus,
it’s good enough for me.”
—Texas Governor “Ma” Ferguson
(apocryphal)

He doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. Who knows what might happen if he did? Everyone is so tense, so upset all the time, despite the holidays. The heat probably. Getting Praetor up so early was not a good idea. This is just the second time he has been allowed inside, even with his many years of service. It’s cooler here and not nearly so dusty, but Praetor is no happier. His migraine of course.

“What did he say?” Praetor asks, and the interpreter repeats the word “king,” though then he says “or steward” because the word the accused employed does not seem to mean “king” at all, not in the way it is usually used, though “steward” doesn’t seem quite right … Read More »

Mary Gordon

An angel in a golden robe escorts the last of three ladies of a certain age into a well-appointed sitting room. It is tenderly lit; there are bowls of scentless cream-colored flowers on tables of a heartbreaking polish. Clearly arranged to the greatest possible conversational advantage are three upholstered chairs, covered in a lemon-colored silk. Two of the chairs are already filled; in one, a stoutish woman sits, an iron-colored bun on the top of her head, her hands folded quietly on her lap. Her face is contented; it would be wrong to say that she is smiling. The woman in the chair across from her has her hair done in a knot at the nape of her neck; threads of grey stand out in the chignon, but far fewer than her companions. The third, escorted by … Read More »

Edgardo Cozarinsky
translated by the author

1. “Il vecchio non trova pace”

What’s that you’re saying, I am about to snap at the barman with my coldest voice and a killer look, when I realize he wasn’t staring at me but at another old man, maybe younger than me, who knows, but who showed those signs of senectitude I take care not to offer to the perfidious onlooker—head bowed, definitively defeated, trying to follow the spasmodic shaking of a blonde on the dance floor.

And how could he find peace, il vecchio, who knows how much champagne he has already bought her, and how much else if this is not their first time, and of course the blonde is deep inside herself, shaking and shaking for nobody, no one, two, or four, not caring who is in front of her, … Read More »

Eitán Futuro
translated by Jennifer Croft

[an excerpt]

Lara began to kiss me. I hadn’t kissed her first because I thought you couldn’t kiss them on the mouth. I touched her breasts over her bra and lay down on the bed. They were fine. Mariela had had hers done last year. The first time we were together—my first time—she didn’t let me take her t-shirt off. She said they were too small, and if I saw them I wasn’t going to want to be with her anymore. She also didn’t want me to take off my t-shirt. She said I was really thin, and that it freaked her out. She didn’t even take her tights all the way off. She got this idea in her head that if I wanted it so bad, I ought to have to tear through her … Read More »

Aaron Thier

Perhaps one discovers the Aberdeen Bestiary in a moment of idleness. Perhaps while searching, as sometimes one must, for descriptions of carnal love between sailors and mermaids. Perhaps on an afternoon of driving rain, the sky rolling like surf, the palm trees tossing their heads, disoriented pelicans sailing past the windows.

How interesting, then, to learn that pelicans typically kill their young and that, having done so, they open up a gash on their own flank and let the blood run over the dead chicks, which brings them back to life. And how interesting to learn that the pelican, with its clumsy prehistoric appearance, is by no means the most peculiar of birds. The bat, for instance, is the only bird with teeth, and bees, the smallest of all birds, are twice as fertile as any … Read More »

Veronica Stigger
translated by Ramon Stern and Chris Meade

Opalka entered the small room in his son Natanael’s house and walked to the window, under which was a square wooden table, one of its sides pressed against the wall. On top of the table was a legal pad with a hard red cover, closed, a pot of ink—also red—and a pen. He sat down on the straw chair and opened the journal, where the following had been written:

Making an old book
a book of voyages
with pages that unfold

The story will start in a big city
—in a metropolis—
or by the sea

It will be the story of a lone man
an old man
a tired man

The man will be about sixty years old
wear a three-piece suit and two-tone shoes
and he’ll have a chimpanzee

His chimpanzee will be huge
the same size as my character
tall and … Read More »

Dorothy Spears

An impotent man on vacation, so potent at work, keeps going at his wife every night, every afternoon. “I need to prove that I’m norm…I mean, that I’m all right,” he whispers, with coiled desperation.

The wife buries her face into a synthetic pillowcase, recalling a discussion they’d had a decade ago about a birthday card from George. He’d accused her of trying to ruin him, citing her need to discuss the birthday card as an attempt to undermine his confidence. It was only a few months after their wedding; he’d picked up her favorite wedding gift, a Navajo bowl, and smashed it against the oak floor of their apartment.

Today, after breakfast, and another failed attempt, she goes for a solitary bike ride. Down the road the workmen wave and grunt “Salaut.” They are splitting boulders … Read More »

Lincoln Michel

The wind whipped salty air against Silas Woodrow’s face, but his daughter was nowhere in sight. She was always doing things like this.

Silas walked slowly back to the station and wiped his neck and face with napkins from the café counter. His leg ached. He sat in a chair and looked up at the menu. The doctors had told him he couldn’t order espressos or anything acidic. He wondered if there was anything tasty he could eat in the whole damn country.

A man in a tightly tailored suit kept opening and looking into his leather briefcase. Silas figured he was in the mafia. The briefcase probably contained drugs or money or cut-off pinky fingers.

Silas tried to remember why the wedding was in Italy anyway. Someone on one side of the damn dentist’s family must have … Read More »

Giovanna Rivero
translated by Rachael Small

The pointless memories are the most beautiful ones. I must have been, what, eight years old when this guy with a bird’s name, Piri, came to my grandparents’ house. He’d come to help my grandmother with the little sausage and bakery business she’d set up in her third courtyard. It sounds unbelievable, I know, but the house really did have three courtyards and in the third, as I said, my grandmother had set up a real life steam-powered manufacturing line for chorizo and bread. If you showed up very early in the morning, you could imagine the smoke belched out by the grinders, ovens, crushers, fillers and pots being, logically, the smog that rose in a frenzy from the First World’s last generation of machines.

In what should have been the house’s hall, … Read More »

David Leavitt

The day that Paris was declared an Open City, I went to say goodbye to the Baron. He was one of my oldest friends. I’d known him since 1931, the year I’d come to Paris, a boy of nineteen living by his wits in a prostitution hotel on Rue Lepic. The Baron himself still lived, as he had his entire life, in a vast gloomy apartment on Avenue Mozart. Portraits of bustled women and narrow-snouted dogs hung on the walls. The piano wore a silk shawl of the sort that grandmothers draw around their shoulders in winter. For a long time the Baron had been rich, but he had lost most of his capital, including the Baroness, in the crash of ’29.

I could not remember a time when the elevator in the Baron’s building had … Read More »