By Susmita Mukherjee The fan whirred lazily above the small dining table as the morning light filtered through the thin lace curtains. The sound of traffic from the main road drifted faintly into the modest two-bedroom flat in North Kolkata….

By: Peter Aronson Every Sunday morning, Paul rides the subway uptown from his place to visit his mom and dad in their Morningside Heights apartment. Although he was forewarned by his older friends, he was struggling with what he was…

By Eugen Oniscu With each passing day, Chirilă Leonte’s health worsened more and more. He was forced to give up his work as a bricklayer because he was feeling increasingly unwell, yet he could not bring himself to go to…

By Zary Fekete “You can’t pray a lie – I found that out.” Emmanuel lifted his head after re-reading the same line for the fifth time. He finally gave up. He had been trying to read Huckleberry Finn to practice…

By: Luis Iglesias-Villacorta It was late in the evening, and they lay in bed feeling the warmth of each other. The moonlight shone on their feet and a breeze came in through the window. They faced each other and talked…

By: Peter Aronson The world was weighing heavy on Bert Stein, grabbing and twisting his mind, bending him sideways. He was having trouble thinking straight. There was no poker game that night on the commuter train leaving New York City,…

By: Cynthia Pitman Had there but been an Oracle sitting atop Fifth Mountain, I might have been warned: It is not the touch, it is the reachthat holds us captive –the gnawing ache that propels the handto stretch, to seek.That…

By Michael Pattinson Yumi met Claire the way a mirror catches light: unexpectedly, naturally, and immediately revealing. It was during an exhibition opening at a small gallery in Nakameguro, one that featured a collection themed around “Emotions with No Translation.” Claire stood…

   By: Yurii Tokar I first noticed third-grader Vitalik Karvatsky when I lined up the children in a column of two (to make it easier to count) in front of the bus. It was supposed to take twenty schoolchildren of…

By: Dalton Henderson “CRACK” “Don’t take ONE step closer!” The bullet sliced through the air above his head, a sound that had unfortunately become familiar. Luke Hendry ducked behind a wagon and rotated the cylinder of his revolver, half as…