A. NATASHA JOUKOVSKY
There is something post-decadent about Versailles in winter. The fountains are off; there are not many tourists. Everything is still fiercely geometric and over-the-top, but in this gray, expired kind of way, at least most of the day; the crisp chill of nighttime being an exception.

JINJIN XU
Five times a day, there are knocks on my door and I have to open. I am learning to distinguish between the frantic banging of the hazmat-suited man taking my temperature, and the rushed taps of the man delivering plastic cartons of hot food. On my third day, two medics knocked…

CASEY WALKER
Couples filled the Café Suíça, no longer the solitary men of before the war. From the rack of newspapers, they never chose the copies of O Século. They spoke anything but Portuguese. French and English. German. Slavic languages he could barely identify.

OONA PATRICK
The Alentejo is the landscape of heartbreak. Or at least it was to me. Even its trees are clearly loners, set apart from each other at distant intervals across miles of sere brown fields. The Alentejo is all about waiting, with its numbered cork trees, their skinned underbellies…

HÉLIO PÓLVORA
The man gazes at the slope climbing to Olivença square. He doesn’t need to go up there to know that the small, circular plaza, carpeted with grass, has a large cross and a white church—and that from there, as far as the eye can see, the coast, bordered with coconut palms, lies shimmering in the distance.

LATOYA FAULK
What of those like Grandma who refused continual abuse and letdowns? There is so little talk of Black women who age and come to find endless love in the companionship of their children. These are women like Grandma who find peace in homeplace without husbands and have few regrets for leaving…

Raynor Winn
We’d expected extremes of weather while we were on the Coast Path, British weather. Wind, rain, fog, occasional hail even, but not the heat, the burning, suffocating heat. By lunchtime we’d crawled out of the shade of Woody Bay into an intensely hot afternoon.

SURAJ ALVA
You are in a chamber, waiting for the bailiff. When he comes in, you wish you had been killed. Not your brother. The rusted scent of the metal chair you’re on reminds you of the smell of his blood on your hands, chest, and hair: sweetly pungent with a strong hint of iron. 

BUSHRA ELFADIL
Every Friday morning, all the residents in the simmering neighborhood of Wilat in this drab African city waited for the General to appear, to officially open the narrow street that passed between their houses.

EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG
I think the passage of time can be the most devastating thing about being alive. People say time heals all wounds but sometimes it’s the opposite, isn’t it? The farther away we get from something beautiful and complicated that happened to us, sometimes the more it hurts, precisely because it’s past and we’ll never have it again or never master it.