Fiction

Translation: Side Entrance to the House

By AMAL AL SAEEDI
Translated from the Arabic by NASHWA NASRELDIN

Piece appears below in English. To view the original Arabic, please click here.

 

Translator’s note:

Amal al Saeedi’s Side Entrance to the House immediately caught my attention. For one, literature that centers the house intrigues me; perhaps it’s the innate mystery held within the brick walls that surrounds us, the way it enfolds us, inhabiting us as much as we inhabit it. Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, The House with Only an Attic and a Cellar, by Kathryn Maris, Laura Scott’s So Many Rooms, Eman Abderahim’s Rooms and Other Stories, have all lured me in by the title first.

Translation: Side Entrance to the House
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The Con Artist

By GLENN BERTRAM

 

In April, Simon went down to Murray Park to eat hamburgers with the Methodists. It was his monthly tradition. The Methodists’ burgers were charred and rubbery, but the Methodists themselves made ideal marks. They were upstanding citizens with steady jobs at regional banks and local power stations. They’d known neither poverty nor wealth. And they weren’t teetotalers like the Baptists, so you could ply them with craft beer and get them yapping about golf and gambling and everything their marriages lacked. They assumed good faith in the people around them. Simon loved the Methodists. Despite his taste, he chose to find them charming: a matter of professional habit. It was Leonard who’d showed him the way. You had to love your marks.

The Con Artist
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The Shirt

By DAVID RYAN

 

Jonathan finds the shirt on the closeout rack at a trendy vintage shop in Provincetown. He’s never heard of the maker, the satin tag embroidered in the neck as if by hand, it looks British, probably twenty, thirty years old, this short sleeve—the cloth heavier than cloth, at least the cloth of shirts he might normally afford. The muted blue-green-grey rayon shimmers, the smallest blues and greens houndsteeth fused into a strange harmony within the gray and fine-lined black blocking. Its gentle plaids inferentially iridescent. And this, like an aura hovers about the shirt, its inferred past, as if the weave of fibers are quietly singing an elegy, an amassing of light. He fingers the cloth, imagines the fingers of a millworker feeding the cord into a sewing machine, shuddering wooden bobbins in some industrial town. And then he tries it on.

It’s his favorite shirt for a couple of years. One night, he wears it over a white, long-sleeved henley to a club where a friend of a friend knows the singer in the band playing. Jonathan and his friend get backstage. For reasons later forgotten—perhaps in a fit of generosity produced by the free bourbon in the dressing room, he lets the drummer, who’d commented on how beautiful the shirt was, wear it on stage. Jonathan and his friend return to the audience for the show. There his shirt appears, on stage, shimmering under the lights, and the moment of its glory, strangely perhaps, feels as if belonging to Jonathan.

The Shirt
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Silk Road

By NIEVES GARCÍA BENITO
Translated by CARMELA FERRADÁNS

Piece appears below in English and the original Spanish.

 

Translator’s Note

“Silk Road” is one of twelve short stories in Nieves García Benito’s collection By Way of Tarifa (Por la vía de Tarifa), originally published in 1999.

Forced migration and human trafficking are two of the most pressing humanitarian issues in the world today. In the Mediterranean alone, thousands of people travel across the Straits of Gibraltar every year on their way to Europe, but only a few arrive at their final destinations in France and Germany. Many are stuck working in the fields of Murcia, Spain. Many more drown around the waters of Tarifa, the southernmost point of Europe, a mere nine miles from the coasts of Morocco. This is the location where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic, where Africa and Europe are the closest and at the same time the farthest away for so many people. Nieves García Benito’s stories give voice to these children, men, and women who leave their homes in Africa hoping for a better life, a safer life in Europe.

Silk Road
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Little Women

By MEGAN TENNANT

1.

In December, one of those nothing afternoons after Christmas, my younger sister Ruth returns to the holiday house, where I am bored with extended family on the stoep. The guests get up, ready to greet them, while my dad finds chairs for her and David. But she pauses with a funny look on her face, as if she’s remembered a dream or eaten something sweet, and says she’s engaged. Now everyone rises, and I make my own lips follow in a smile. David is bashful behind her, accepting hugs and handshakes. I’d like to ask him why he didn’t tell me he was going to propose, ask my parents if they knew. Of course they knew.  

Little Women
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The Advice

By IRENE PUJADAS
Translated by JULIA SANCHES

 

Spurred by the idea that you are interdependent and would do well to lean on others (on the opinions, advice, and experiences of others), you’re roped into taking part in a general meeting to decide your future. 

Some of your friends bring folders filled with graphs and statistics. One in particular comes bearing the works of authors, philosophers, historians, and psychoanalysts. Relevant passages are marked with Post-it notes.  

Your family and friends only want what’s best for you, or rather, they want you to do something.  

The Advice
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Lunch at the Boqueria

By MERCÈ IBARZ
Translated by MARA FAYE LETHEM

Close, so close he can already taste it. This afternoon he’ll become the owner of a secret. But first he’ll have lunch with his mother, who’s waiting for him at the restaurant in the back of the Boqueria Market, and once he’s got her home safely, he’ll meet up with the current owner of a Picasso engraving and he’ll buy it.

Lunch at the Boqueria
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A Humble Invitation from Your Floor Supervisor

By DOUGLAS KOZIOL

Watch the author read from this piece at our Issue 28 launch party:

It was an early afternoon in mid-July, the sun at the height of its powers, and while Laura was stirring a gin and tonic, her co-workers were stretching their picket line across the parking lot of the New Epoch shoe factory. Sitting in a wicker chair on the stained deck of the palatial home of the floor supervisor and his wife, a cool breeze sweeping through the overhanging trees, her ears buzzing with the chirping of birds and the bubbling of the pool filter, Laura told herself she never wanted to be here. She knew any deal between workers and management had to be made with the backing of the entire factory floor. Otherwise, the bosses would try to pick them off one by one, like lions to lagging gazelle. Still, it had been decided she would accept the supervisor’s offer to negotiate over dinner, if not to strike a deal, then at least to feel the man out.

The screen door to the house screeched open, and Laura turned to find her supervisor’s wife, Fatimah, stepping out onto the deck with a tray of charcuterie and a pair of fresh drinks.

A Humble Invitation from Your Floor Supervisor
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Forever Red

By TINA VALLÈS
Translated by SAMANTHA MATEO

 

Whenever there’s any discussion of the hunger that marked the years following the Spanish Civil War, I’m reminded of the story about my paternal great-grandmother and the apple. My father says her name, halting at that g that separated her from all the other Annas. Maria Agna. No family dinner passed without mention of that apple. But, after so many years, I can’t quite remember if it’s an apple or a peach. My father always said the basket his grandmother carried back from the field emitted a potent scent, but I don’t think apples smell strongly enough that you could pick them out while driving in a truck a couple of meters away.  

Forever Red
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