Her 8:30s are late, the first of the day. She waits out front, beneath the largest of the three dogwoods. It’s strange to be here, standing like this, pretending to have arrived a relative stranger to this house. But she’s been here her whole life, hasn’t she? Frosted branches hover and reach in the morning…
Restless, you find yourself in New York again. An unlikely place for your ghost to turn up, since during your time as a mortal, you were so unhappy here. Everyone knew it. Ten months and five social disasters later, you set sail for Spain, for Granada, vowing never to return to this godforsaken city. Yet,…
Mid-morning, mid-June, the sky thick with moisture, blanched milky as a cataract overhead, the horizons blurred, gone vague and unreliable. The tiered streetscape of apartment, office, and shop windows reflect the wet air back in an overlap of sodden drifts, the heat feeding upon itself as effectively as despair is said to, already over a…
The man they call her husband never married her and never asked about what she left behind in the old country—what or who. It does not matter. The past is behind her, across the Atlantic. Less than a week on an ocean liner to Buenos Aires, then a steamboat up the river to the landlocked…
Her sister loved pepper on everything. Just a little bit more, she’d say, while the waiter stood there, resentful and impatient, twisting the cumbersome wooden mill over and over again, waiting to be released. For Anna, pepper was a take-it-or-leave it spice. Anna loved salt. She loved everything about it: its purity, its texture—the way…
In fiction, our winner is Susan Bartolme, for her piece “Because It’s Yours.” This year’s fiction judge was Dantiel W. Moniz. Of the short story, she writes: “A tender and biting depiction of girlhood and the itchiness of assuming a self through the perceived gaze of others. Full of embodied, sensory details I could feel…
I. In the women’s hospital, past the arch of glass and stone, a grand piano played day and night. All the presidents and the vice presidents loved it. The parking attendants hated it. The rest of the hospital—the doctors and the nurses, the physician assistants and the scrub techs, the billers and the coders, the…
When I started my summer internship at Bible House, I was assigned to the Kids’ Corner exhibits even though I told them up front I didn’t have a heart for children. I hadn’t liked kids much even when I was one myself. Growing up had been a relief. The supervisors at Bible House see a…
Translated from the Hungarian by Marietta Morry and Walter Burgess1 What he noticed at first were white areas here and there on the wall between pictures. There were no replacements, nor did they rearrange the paintings, as if the bare spaces didn’t bother them. Even though the boy remembered that they used to move them…
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