6:30 a.m. Alina wakes up, brushes her teeth, applies unobtrusive makeup for school (a dust of powder and lipstick in a soft brown tone). On her way to the kitchen, where she will make the coffee, she wakes Liviu up with a soft caress on his arm. Nothing has changed. 7:25
Read MoreI’ve slept badly again. The farmhouse is unearthly cold. Alive, too, in the still of night, with ticks, groans, intestinal gurgles. The fridge, juddering to a halt. Alice was restless. Shy of dawn I heard her get up, potter about downstairs. She’s left a note on the kitchen table: can run you
Read MoreUncle Bubbles was a small and sinewy man, known around the village for wearing hobnail boots in all seasons. I had overheard the rumours – at mass, in the corner shop – that he had webbed feet and that was the reason; but anytime I challenged my mother or sister about it, they would only smirk a
Read MoreFame had never felt as seductive or as life-affirming as it had been when Luella was still dreaming of it, her eyes tight shut and her heart murmuring with the possibilities it held. Now that she had it, all she wanted was to set it aside like a childhood relic that had lost its sentimental value. W
Read MoreLeena had to starve herself for three months, but eventually her figure is boyish as his. She exercises in secret, locking her fingers over the beam above the kitchen doorframe and hauling herself up until her arms burn and her stomach muscles shake. As Anuj wastes slowly into bone and mattress, she
Read MoreShe pulled a bunch of ribbons from her jacket pocket, selected a red one, then squeezed it in the palm of her hand. ‘I wish,’ she said, and closed her eyes, ‘I wish that today will be the day that I find you.’ She took the ribbon to the large elm tree and tied it onto a low hanging bra
Read MoreWhen Misha lost her fifth baby tooth, she understood that she was going to die one day. She couldn’t say why it was this tooth in particular that had caused this revelation, but there it was, plain as the bloody molar in her palm: the truth, plucked out into the open from a place where it had b
Read MoreI can hear my brothers, my uncles, my great-uncles hammering away in the mines twenty floors beneath us. Candlelight toys with the dining room and for a second my world becomes dark. Grandpa begins, spewing out the same rhetoric he does every time the three of us are together. His hands are stain
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