The fear had to be taught. It wasn’t something women were born with. Kirstin birthed the fear in them, not like giving birth, but like controlling a robot.
It was Kirstin’s job to make women think their body odors were bad. To scare them at the signature of their own scent, sour...
[Risto—Aristofano Al’Kair—is a rarity in contemporary Italy, an immigrant success story. Out of Mogadishu, he’s earned citizenship and lives now in Naples, with a wife who’s a native. Here, the two take advantage of a rare quiet moment.]
<p...
Every Monday, Mock City. You get up at five am, but instead of driving north to the airport, you drive south through strip malls and suburbs. You drive to the police academy where you were trained and now work one morning a week. Mock City...
I’m afraid of my son. I’ve known a terror beyond terror because of my beautiful boy. He’s beloved by other children, his teachers, and my husband, his father. I never tell anyone what’s really going on, especially his father. Not only would he not want to hear it, he wouldn’t believe it and might...
In a cemetery, the same darkness as that between stars grows moss. Time unlocks tunnels and tunnels behind those rocks.
In a warm pasture overlooking the Austrian village of Stockerau, six-year-old Ernst Herbeck nibbles a long blade of grass, back against an oak, inhaling the loamy moistness of cow patties, daydreaming of Berlin.
<p class="wp-block...The Fog The fog came unpredictably as a gift (after the sticky sleep and awkward, stoic morning). I smelled toast but never saw it. The door closed and I cried a little in the bathtub. Right, the fog - Hanging over the hole where the Nets will play someday, sliding down Dean Street as a happy hour pickleback might at half-time of Germany vs. Austria. It came...
“Gonna tonight go kill us a boy,” Elzira said, rising to full height. “Gonna tonight go make it right for Dodie.” But the candle-lit circle of cross-legged girls sitting around Elzira looked away from her, to the dark corner under the rafters, to the bottle and hammer that’d been laid atop a stack of cinderblocks...
X
I am you and who I see is me, if anything
happens it happens in me, it happens in you,
I see the lilac shadow of a tree and it seems
to me...
Novel excerpt translated by Tess Lewis on behalf of the Austrian Cultural Forum, New York. Published in the original (Geistergeschichte) by Literaturverlag Droschl, 2019.
Anne closes the apartment door from inside...
For years I tried to put together a picture of my grandfather. He was an Egyptian Romantic poet of some notoriety. All around me were his books and photographs from my mother’s childhood. His portrait, painted at the turn of the century, hung framed in the hallway along with a portrait of my grandmother by the same...
Like cans with expired shelf lives, stored away at the bottom of a box of old books, I happened upon my father’s journals after moving to a smaller apartment with my son. I took them into my hands, hesitated, then placed them gently aside. The next morning I began to leaf through...
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