Translated by MAIA TABET
As soon as he elbowed me in the ribs, whipping my averted face toward the pitch-black corner, I thought I heard him saying, “Frightened, eh?”
Truly, I was frightened.
By GHALIB HALASA
Translated by THORAYA EL-RAYYES
At the borderland between the desert and the plains, Emirate of Transjordan, early twentieth century
Two men sat near the round threshing floor in the western fields. Each with his rifle on his lap. “What a goddamn year,” Tafish said. He had a skull-like face. Small, sunken, deep-set eyes. Emaciated cheeks with protruding cheekbones. A broad forehead with dark blue veins at the sides. Skin like an aged tortoise. His hair and lower jaw were hidden behind a white keffiyeh, held in place by a black fleece cord around his head. His frame was tall, straight, lithe. He rubbed his nose with his hand, letting a low whistle out of his nostrils. By the time he lowered his hand, a pensive expression of disgust had formed on his face. Staring straight ahead, he spoke, as if to himself: “What a goddamn year.”
Translated by ALICE GUTHRIE
Adam
As broken as a venial sin,
and as weary as the last to be created (or the first),
he looked to the sky, now become his ground.
Once he’d learned about naming and questioning, and saw what he saw of the blue corridors of space, he asked himself:
I wonder what the Throne is?
Did the Throne of the Almighty exist before water, or arise after water? And what is water, anyway?
Despairing, he smacked the trunk of the tree he was sitting under.
By JAMILA AMAIREH
Translated by THORAYA EL-RAYYES
1
I sit on my old chair, scatter my multicolored toys around me, and start watching evening cartoons on TV. Cool Pancho shoots off through the streets in his car, feeling awesome. He’d bought the car back from the old lady living next door. Never mind that he’d paid too much, more than two thousand pounds. No problem. He slows down, speeds up, and finally stops at the green fields to go for a stroll. The episode ends, but I stay glued to the television, waiting for my truly favorite cartoon: The Adventures of Zaina the Bee. Zaina is a menacing creature; she has no other business but instigating pranks on her friend Nahhul. Nahhul, for his part, has no choice but to come crawling back to his bully-of-a-buddy every time.
Translated by ELISABETH JAQUETTE
Between France and Marrakech is a route upon which travels a single bus from Paris. The bus reaches its destination safely, as one might hope and expect. Then the passengers who so desire transfer to another bus, which takes them by an established road to Agadir.
By RYŪNOSUKE AKUTAGAWA
Translated by NATHANIEL GALLANT
I have enclosed this letter in another sent to Mr. Lama Chobuden1 of Darjeeling, India, and expect by now it has been forwarded along from him to Japan. While I am not without my concerns as to whether or not you will indeed receive the letter, if by some chance it were not to make the passage, I am given solace only by the fact that you are not in any particular anticipation of a letter. That being said, if you are to receive this letter, I am certain that you will find yourself taking some amusement in my fate. First, I am living in Tibet. Second, I have become a Chinese person. Third, I share a wife with three other husbands.
1999
My mother comes to visit me every few weeks. There’s nothing unusual about that, except she lives in a nursing home she isn’t supposed to leave. She wraps what used to be my father’s long winter coat over her shoulders, pays one of the nurses to sneak her out, and climbs into the back seat of an idling car that waits outside.
Translated by Thoraya El-Rayyes
How to make a cup of hot chocolate
Stand in front of the window of your kitchen refuge and prepare the following ingredients:
By KATE BERSON
First morning in Nueva York, in los EEUU, and Néstor in the kitchen was a stone his daughter rushed around like river water. Two years past her quinceañera, one more year of high school left, thirteen years since he last saw her. Néstor had kept running all the numbers in his head the whole way up to la Frontera, but here and now such compulsive calculations fell away, replaced finally by the actual, the reachable young woman those many years had yielded: Sara.
In the dark blue space between night and morning, Kendra is biking to work in Philadelphia when she sees a flatbed truck, carrying a single steel coil, fueling up at the all-night Sunoco station on Baltimore Avenue. The coil is a giant roll of duct tape, its silver layers wound so tight it looks solid, rising six feet tall, and secured with heavy chains. It sits exactly in the middle of the trailer, loaded eye-to-the-side, as if it could roll right down and off the flatbed. There are words, truckers’ words, for this particular way of hauling a coil, but Kendra can’t remember them. What she remembers is the weekend she rode through Tennessee in her father’s orange Freightliner Cascadia to deliver a coil just like this one. The memory is six years old, but she is always finding reasons for it.
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