Issue 15 Fiction | Page 2

Forty-Four Thousand Pounds

April 30, 2018 Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction

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.

The Haiku Master

April 30, 2018 Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction

By MARILYN SIDES

At first, I did not recognize the Haiku Master standing in the porch light so late at night. Who was this old man, so tall and frail he might any second tip over, fall slowly, stiffly, lightly like a hollow tree?

I did recognize the white shirt the Master wore. A style of shirt you used to see worn by men in the Southwest, shirts of thin cotton, short-sleeved, pin-tucked up and down the front, two pockets, square-cut bottom. And then I remembered all the members of the Master’s haiku circle wore this shirt, a uniform of sorts. The same shirt I myself was wearing, one of my father’s. The day before, a month after my father’s funeral, I had left my husband behind and driven down from Denver to Cortez to clean out my father’s house—couldn’t put it off anymore. I found a bunch of these shirts in the back of his closet and put one on. The gesture a combination of nostalgia—the shirts reminded me of my father when he was younger—and the ruthless practicality required after a death. Good cleaning clothes, then good dust cloths, then I’d throw them out.

Propositions

April 30, 2018 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By HAIFA’ ABUL-NADI
Translated by ELISABETH JAQUETTE

Coffee

His coffee lasts. It’s what he starts his mornings with, early, and then he drinks half a cup in the mid-afternoon. It keeps him company. Maybe the smell of it fresh is the reason he keeps sipping it, even after it’s gone cold. Or maybe he has other reasons. Maybe he feels a certain duty, a responsibility toward it. His coffee, poured into a paper cup, changes in color, shape, and size each day, depending on the kiosk he buys it from. The man and his coffee spend the whole day together, and then he leaves it on his desk or the first ledge he sees. He abandons it without a last sip, or even a word of farewell. He leaves the paper cup of coffee and returns to his world, trusting that another one will be waiting for him in another kiosk tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that.

The Village Idiot

April 30, 2016 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 15, Issue 15 Fiction, Translation

By MAJIDAH AL-OUTOUM

Translated by ALICE GUTHRIE

We awoke one morning to news of a death. The person we had lost was the one we used to call the Village Idiot—that buffoon who used to make us laugh and cry at the same time, that leaping, dancing ball of energy who would hurl himself around, wild with enthusiasm, stomping on our toes and crashing into us as he went gesticulating by.