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Exotic Pets

April 14, 2022 Fiction, Poetry Recordings

The Common Magazine · Exotic Pets by Cal Shook

The first time Ellis saw the girl, she was sitting on the front stoop of his building. She had a mop in one hand and a broom in the other, like she was using them to guard the place. The packages of Charmin stacked beside her looked like they were at attention too. She can’t be more than five or six, thought Ellis. And instead of climbing the stairs and passing her to let himself inside, he stopped, took off his Yankees cap, and with a smile said, Hiya. Hey kid. Hello there.

The girl did as he expected and gaped at the wine-spill of a birthmark on the left half of his face. She sniffed her runny nose up and blinked through her too-long bangs. Her mouth made a little frown and she said, Hi. My mom forgot the Windex.

Translation: Victoria’s Secret

April 7, 2022 Fiction, Translation

By ANDREA CHAPELA

Translated from the Spanish by ALLANA C. NOYES

The story appears below in both English and Spanish.

Before: An Excerpt from Here Lies

March 22, 2022 Fiction

By OLIVIA CLARE FRIEDMAN

The following is an excerpt from Here Lies by Oliva Clare Friedman, out now from Grove Press. Click here to purchase.

From before I began, I loved her. This was what I knew. Before the beginning, before I was born from her, before bones and blood and body, before egg.

My mother Naomi was dead and not buried. Dead in fact for half a year. Her body burned to ashes by the state, bones, heart, feet, eyes burned to dust, against her wish, against mine, and that was that. I was trying to understand.

Where Light Travels, Catherine

March 8, 2022 Fiction

By SONYA GILDEA

When Catherine woke and turned the light on, she was shaking, her whole body was cold. This, she thought, is aftershock. She had been fine all afternoon: a little sleepy, but fine. Now she was trembling. Her feet were freezing.

She put on a cardigan, found warm socks and turned the central heating on. It was still dark and too early to let the dogs out. She made coffee, stronger than usual, and sat at the kitchen table without putting on the main light. She liked this time of day. If the tide was coming in, the air was salty and fresh, and you could watch daylight starting out on the water past the rocks.

Excerpt from “Two Sad Clowns”

February 22, 2022 Fiction

By ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN

This piece is excerpted from a story in The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken, a guest at Amherst College’s 2022 LitFest. Click here to purchase.

Even Punch and Judy were in love once. They knew the exact clockwise adjustment required to fit their preposterous profiles together for a kiss, her nose to the left of his nose, his chin to the left of her chin. Before the slapstick and the swazzle, the crocodile and the constable, before above all the baby: they’d known how to be sweet to each other.

Excerpt from The Committed

February 22, 2022 Fiction

By VIET THANH NGUYEN

This piece is excerpted from The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen, a guest at Amherst College’s 2022 LitFest. Click here to purchase.

We were the unwanted, the unneeded, and the unseen, invisible to all but ourselves. Less than nothing, we also saw nothing as we crouched blindly in the unlit belly of our ark, 150 of us sweating in a space not meant for us mammals but for the fish of the sea. With the waves driving us from side to side, we spoke in our native tongues. For some, this meant prayer; for others, curses. When a change in the motion of the waves shuttled our vessel more forcefully, one of the few sailors among us whispered, We’re on the ocean now. After hours wind- ing through river, estuary, and canal, we had departed our motherland.

The navigator opened the hatch and called us onto the deck of our ark, which the uncaring world denigrated as merely a boat. By the lopsided smile of the crescent moon, we saw ourselves alone on the surface of this watery world. For a moment we were giddy with delight, until the rippling ocean made us giddy in another way. All over the deck, and all over one another, we turned ourselves inside out, and even after nothing remained we continued to heave and gasp, wretched in our retching. In this manner we passed our first night on the sea, shivering with the ocean breezes.

Dawn broke, and in every direction we saw only the infinitely receding horizon. The day was hot, with no shade and no respite, with nothing to eat but a mouthful and nothing to drink but a spoonful, the length of our journey unknown and our rations limited. But even eating so little, we still left our human traces all over the deck and in the hold, and were by evening awash in our own filth. When we spotted a ship near the horizon at twilight, we screamed ourselves hoarse. But the ship kept its distance. On the third day, we came across a freighter breaking through the vast desert of the sea, a dromedary with its bridge rising over its stern, sailors on deck. We screamed, waved, jumped up and down. But the freighter sailed on, touching us only with its wake. On the fourth and fifth days, two more cargo ships appeared, each closer than the one before, each under a different flag. The sailors pointed at us, but no matter how much we begged, pleaded, and held up our children, the ships neither swerved nor slowed.

Excerpt: Intimacies

February 16, 2022 Fiction

By KATIE KITAMURA

This piece is excerpted from Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, a guest at Amherst College’s 2022 LitFest.
Click here to purchase.

1.
I arrived in The Hague with a one-year contract at the Court and very little else. In those early days when the city was a stranger to me, I rode the tram without purpose and walked for hours at a time, so that I would sometimes become lost and need to consult the map on my phone. The Hague bore a family resemblance to the European cities in which I had spent long stretches of my life, and perhaps for this reason I was surprised by how easily and frequently I lost my bearings. In those moments, when the familiarity of the streets gave way to confusion, I would wonder if I could be more than a visitor here.

Sometimes the Sun Becomes a Dragon You Can’t Escape

February 1, 2022 Fiction

By RACHEL KOZLOSKI

After the Celtic folktale of King Eochaid and his sons

Sometimes the sun becomes a dragon you can’t escape. It was that kind of Sunday when Nicole and her sisters sat bored and panting on their stoop, too tired and sun-stoned to fight with each other, or to find something to do. Occasionally one of them exhaled loudly, with noise, “Huuhhnnnnn” because that was the only way to feel release.

Cockroach

January 19, 2022 Fiction

By RAJOSIK MITRA

I

It is 3:46 A.M. July, 2019. This cockroach is a creature of habit, something that crawls out from the cracks right after the lights are out. Nobody sees it till it is right there, suddenly there, on that exact same spot every night. It has a look on it that tells you it is old, that it’s been waiting there for ages, waiting for something inevitable that never comes, always deferred. Its antennae, moving in a slow rhythm, sweep the air above its head.

Cheo

January 3, 2022 Fiction

By XAVIER NAVARRO AQUINO

I knew Vega Baja like the hairs on my feet. I used to work part-time en Tortuguero BBQ before landing in Florencia with the mongers. I walked and walked. It would be days until I reached Memoria, but I knew someone dear that still lived in Vega Baja, so I figured it fine to stop and visit my old friend.