Fiction | The Common

Islands

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

Twelve years ago, in waters off the Azores, my father was thrown overboard on a whale-watching skiff and my mother thought she could save him. The trip had been my mother’s dream. She hadn’t seen the islands since she was a child, visiting her grandparents. My father’s overconfidence about boating in bad weather, an unanticipated storm surge, a possibly intoxicated boat pilot—that was the tragedy of my mother’s ancestral homecoming. No bodies were ever recovered. In lieu of caskets, the funeral director set up an oversized portrait taken on my parents’ wedding day. That young couple, with expressions formally posed, was all but unrecognizable to me.

Ellen

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By ELSA LYONS

Giving birth hurt much less than I had expected. There was a feeling like someone’s hands were tying my organs into intricate knots and then loosening them. Finally, a great loosening, and a wail, a tiny squirming marvel lowered into my arms. During pregnancy, I had been afraid of the pain. It seemed wrong to be afraid, so I didn’t discuss it, not even with Andrew. I had never experienced overwhelming physical pain; nothing more than a fractured ankle in ninth grade, a couple of bad toothaches. I knew this would be worse—I just wished there was a way to know precisely how much worse.

Smith

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By CORY BEIZER

Before my mother can return to her life and stop watching me eat, she says she must give me a dog. She swears a companion is the only way she’ll feel safe leaving me alone. It makes no sense. How can I take care of a dog if I am failing to take care of myself? She says that’s the point, to learn how to care, and if the dog dies, well, then she’ll know when to come back. I tell her no. My beloved cow figurine is companion enough. Its thick apotropaic horns will fend off the evil that is sure to return.

Mermaid of Longnook

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By LAURA GERINGER BASS

Carla wore a mask while trudging down the precipitous dune that shadowed Longnook Beach, her heaven on earth. She had brought from her city stash a colorful assortment of boldly patterned Mexican face coverings to make the necessity of protecting herself from airborne viral droplets less depressing. But bright flowers and butterflies, stout yellow ears of corn, and iconic unibrow Frida Kahlo faces made it no easier to breathe on the descent.

Most days, Carla used the shaft of her sheathed sun umbrella to steady herself while maneuvering over uneven ground. Today, Tom wasn’t there to help her carry her beach chair, so she had left the heavy umbrella at home. She wasn’t one of those old ladies who needed a cane, was she? A grinding creak from her arthritic left knee followed by an aching twinge and throb of pain from her right hip warned her that the uphill return would be a challenge.

The Sixteenth Brother

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By A. J. BERMUDEZ

The way Khalida tells the story is this: for two hundred years, Riad Jennaa has belonged to the descendants of Abdellah Bensaïd. But, she is swift to point out, not all his descendants. In Morocco, since time immemorial and perhaps even before then, women have received half the inheritance of their male counterparts. She tells this part with a shrug. It’s not fair, but it’s the Quran.

Faction of None

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By TAMAS DOBOZY

The videos of Christmas dinner were for Mom, or so Pete said. His gift, honoring the hours she’d spent preparing the meals. But he couldn’t fool me—or her. He filmed the dinners because it got him out of eating what she cooked: the tofurkey he hated, the beet salad that made him gag, the quinoa that sparkled like a plateful of sand. Pete would rather have starved than eaten food he didn’t like, which was most food, staying skinny as a nail with the hunger he preferred, as if craving was better than sustenance, desire superior to satisfaction, and want itself his personal god.

Some Kind of Corporate Retreat

October 14, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By TERAO TETSUYA
Translated by KEVIN WANG

The piece appears below in both English and the original Chinese.

Translator’s Note

“Some Kind of Corporate Retreat” is collected in Terao Tetsuya’s Spent Bullets (HarperVia, 2025), a book of nine linked short stories about Taiwanese prodigies turned disillusioned Big Tech engineers. In official American narratives, immigrant experiences often become flattened into palatable arcs of resilience. But this story insists on being wounded, unresolved, and playfully deviant in its exploration of hollow relationships and a simmering desire for destruction.

Knives, Tongues

October 2, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By SIMONÉ GOLDSCHMIDT-LECHNER

Translated from the German by MELODY MAKEDA LEDWON

Translator’s Note

“I need you to translate my book. You’re the person I would ask,” Simoné said to me as we sat on a panel about intersectionality and translation at the Translationale Berlin in the winter of 2023. We laughed briefly at how she had managed to weave this translation proposal into her response to a question about challenges in the German translation industry. Honored, intrigued, a bit nervous, I accepted.

Messer, Zungen, written primarily in German, explores how the erasure of Black people and people of color from the culture of remembrance within the Cape Coloured community in South Africa, also known as Camissa, is intimately tied to their displacement from ancestral lands and historic communal sites. Resisting racial violence, reclaiming memory, history and language therefore involves both returning to lost places and being resilient in hostile spaces. I found the role of language in this context particularly fascinating. The characters speak, remember, and experience their worlds in multiple languages, including Sesotho, English and Afrikaans, creating a mosaic of languages. In my initial draft of “Choir” and “Motherness,” I focused on how to recreate this rich tapestry of language in translation. As I began to revise, and consult with SGL and several colleagues, I concluded that it was most important to respect the characters’ language choices. Above all, I sought to capture the commonplace reality of multilingual worlds and communities. SGL adeptly portrays these realities in her novel without explaining them or making them more palatable to an imagined external audience. In contrast to the original, where passages written in English stand out, in the translation they seamlessly blend into the main language of the text, resulting in a new language mosaic.

—Melody Makeda Ledwon

Raspberries

September 17, 2025 Fiction

By PHOEBE HYDE

The family are in the kitchen waiting to eat as the enemy soldiers approach the house. It’s already dark, and the man and child are restless at the table, waiting for the woman to pronounce the eggs set. She’s an excellent and exacting cook who will not be rushed. As the soldiers step onto the porch outside, the grandmother distracts the child with a joke: what did the rooster say to the wolf? and in the pause before the punchline, the first knock on the door falls—boom—and explodes—boomboomboomboom!

River Landscape

September 4, 2025 Fiction, Translation

By DANIELA ALCÍVAR BELLOLIO

Translated from the Spanish by JACK ROCKWELL

Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.

Translator’s Note

Translating several of Bellolio’s stories, but especially this one, I’ve found that the hardest part has been the beginning. By the time the text hits its stride, somewhere in the second or third pages, it has swept me along with it, and it feels almost effortless—nearly as much so as Bellolio’s painstaking craft makes her own writing seem—to bob and weave with her sentences, to bunch up and then uncoil with the tense spools of her thought. But once I wrap back around to the beginning, I read the first few sentences I’ve translated and am shocked to find what feels like a jerky, uneven mess.

Bellolio rigorously calibrates the motions of her prose, and the elegance of her language applies some serious heft to the felt necessity of her narrator’s thought. This thought, and the careful patterning that structures it, are absolutely essential to this digressive, contemplative story. In the first long paragraph of “River Landscape,” a compassionate investigation of the interior life of a murderer fleeing his crime, a series of repetitions in the text mimics the destructive return of his victim’s face to his mind’s eye. While these repetitions spread out as the story progresses, in the beginning they are stacked thickly on top of one another. Finding the right rock and sway to carry the reader through this dense opening passage took some obsessive tinkering. I’m still not completely satisfied with it, but it’ll have to do for now. There was much going back and forth between alternatives, and much friendly (and incredibly patient) advice given by friends and colleagues, such as Jan Steyn, Emily Graham, Miharu Yano, and Dabin Jeong. I’m very grateful to all of them, and especially to Dabin, who introduced me to Bellolio’s work.

—Jack Rockwell