The Eight Hundred Legs of the Rio-Niterói Bridge

by Renan Bernardo

Have you seen pictures of the unfinished Presidente Costa e Silva Bridge, with its columns telling stories of falls and drownings like tombstones for the never found and the cemented alive?

I saw many in 1972, soon after Papai vanished during the bridge’s construction, mostly by peering over my mother’s shoulders while she flipped through documents and pictures, sobbing and wondering if some ferryman could’ve rescued Papai. Perhaps a fisherman saw a hand waving desperately for help in the water? How could she be sure without staring into the glazed, distant eyes of a deceased husband? After those days, I convinced myself I’d never look at pictures of the bridge under construction again, those tall columns with their gray, ominous girders jutting out of the stone like the last, frantic gestures of hands begging for help.

Except now, twenty years after the accident, I have pictures of the unfinished bridge scattered over my desk.

(Continue Reading…)

The Artists’ Colony

Patrick Freyne

Dear ­­­­­­­______,

I think you would love it here. It’s so peaceful and you were always saying, back in the city, that we needed to get away.

So let me describe what I can see from my writing desk. Outside my window I can see a silver lake which is very still. Behind the lake there is a hill that is partly covered with coniferous trees. Above the hill there is a mottled grey sky. The trees on the hill look like they’ve been painted against that sky with vertical dashes of paint and their reflections in the lake look like inverted impressionist renderings of the same scene.

There is no sound. No engines. No construction. No destruction. No children. No birds. (Continue Reading…)

An Incomplete Account of the Case of the Bird-Talker of Yaros

by Eleanna Castroianni

PANAYOTIS M., interviewed by Eleni Haji, November 1975

When I first saw her, she was covered in wings. Sea birds flocked to her as if she was honey and they were the bees. Watching from the men’s prison, we could always tell which was her cell window by the cluster of flapping, squawking gulls.

The guards were furious. They would thrash around to drive the birds away or even keep her locked in isolation in windowless rooms. But I know she still spoke to them, all of them. A chirrup here, a cry there. You can’t stop them. Birds carry words, my father used to say. Their wings are speech.

(Continue Reading…)

The Travel Guide to the Dimension of Lost Things

By Effie Seiberg

Have you ever felt so tired that you just don’t feel anymore? Where you wake up, burrowed under the covers with a shaft of light somehow piercing through them and right into your brain, and realize that here comes one more day you need to endure, to wait through, until you can blessedly sleep again and stop experiencing this whole existence thing?

This is where I am. I’m deeply considering whether it’s worth just snaking my hand out of my bed-burrito to grab my phone, bring it in, and then just play solitaire until I can fall asleep again instead of even considering what I need to get done today . . . until I realize that the light piercing through is bright green. (Continue Reading…)

The Augur and the Girl Left at His Door

by Greta Hayer

The augur looked at the bridegroom’s back and sighed. He bent close to the bridegroom’s skin, examined every bump and line in his flesh. Most apparent were the red lines, claw marks from fingernails. A less experienced fortune teller would have seen those marks and spoken of the satisfaction of the young man’s new bride, perhaps suggested the imminent birth of a child, but the augur had done this for many years. He knew how to read the skin of a person, living or dead. He knew that there would be no happiness for the couple. There would be a child — there was already a child quickening in the belly of the bride; that much was obvious by the angles of the cuts, the swell of the muscles by the shoulder blades — but that child would be the end of them. It was as clear as dark moles on pale skin; as obvious as the ridge of a spinal column.

The augur told the bridegroom to put his clothes back on. He did not tell the bridegroom about the darkness in his future. The augur had seen other soothsayers punished when they told people things they did not want to hear when he worked for the emperor many years ago. But the augur did not lie. He never lied. And to not tell the whole truth — that was no lie. (Continue Reading…)

Bride, Knife, Flaming Horse

by M. L. Krishnan

To Kalavati, it was well known that if one reached marriageable age, parents and aunties and cousins thrice-removed would clump themselves into anthills of worry. Missiles of relationship managers and matrimonial websites would then be launched to nab a match. It would be a process of adjustments — of settling and tucking and hiding. Of second-rate suitors with second-rate mustaches and identical beige shirts. That was what Kala had always believed, had always known to be proper and true as an oft-repeated lie.

Until she met the man that was a ghoul, but also a knife. Until she met the woman that was a deity, but also a mare.

(Continue Reading…)